Statesman article on Lee Mannix

Lee Mannix, noted dog trainer, killed in car accident


Austin behaviorist used understanding with dogs and trained their people.By Chris Garcia AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 11:04 p.m. Monday, May 3, 2010
Sporting Wrangler jeans, cracked boots and a weathered T-shirt, a plug of Copenhagen tobacco puffing out one cheek, Lee Mannix was a Texas good ol' boy with a distinctly outdoorsy gift: He could talk to the animals.
Mannix, an internationally respected dog behaviorist whose clients included musician Jimmie Dale Gilmore and author Kinky Friedman, made his name with the Lee Mannix Center for Canine Behavior in South Austin, which he founded in 2002. Dogs adored him; their often harried masters, many of whom regarded Mannix a miracle worker, revered him.
Mannix, 40, was killed in a single-vehicle accident Sunday in Hays County. His brother Kevin was in the vehicle and was treated at University Medical Center Brackenridge. He was expected to be released Monday night.
"There are very few people who have the touch, and Lee certainly had it," said Friedman, who co-founded the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch. "His ability to relate to animals was second to none. He could take a dog that everybody's having trouble with and thinks is ferocious and untameable, and two or three weeks later it's a totally different dog. Lee came in as an equal, and the dogs just loved him."
Raised in Odessa and Houston, Mannix, born in 1969, was a teenage scrapper who tracked down trouble like a bird dog. Wearing a mohawk, he ran away from a broken home, got arrested four times, drank too much.
"I was going down a bad road," he told the American-Statesman last summer. Moving in with his best friend's family straightened him out.
After a terrifying run-in with a German shepherd when he was 8 — the wound required 130 stitches — Mannix avoided dogs until he was 20. When he moved to Austin in the late 1990s, a friend gave him a dog. The pair got along just like that. A poetry lover, Mannix named the ridgeback Langston after poet Langston Hughes.
Mannix worked at the Austin Humane Society and DogBoy's Positive Power Kennels in Pflugerville. While he lived briefly in Colorado, Mannix, then 27, was one of the youngest executive directors of the area Humane Society.
Mannix spent 13 years studying with British dog trainers John Rogerson and the late John Fisher, prime authorities in dog training and therapy. He considered himself a scientific trainer and canine behaviorist, not a method trainer
People would often bring their unruly pups to Mannix, who specialized in canine aggression problems, as a last resort. If no one else could fix their dog's severe behavior, Mannix usually could. And if he couldn't, he was candid enough to tell owners it was time to put the dog down.
"I can get a dog to do anything I want it to do. The thing is training the owner to do it," Mannix said last summer. "So I don't train dogs per se; I train owners to understand their dog's behavior and get it right."
Word of mouth keeps the Mannix Center abuzz with pooch problem-solving. Last year, Mannix told the American-Statesman that he received about 100 new client inquiries a day. The center will resume normal business hours today under the leadership of Shari Elkins , lead trainer and behavior consultant, who's worked with Mannix for 12 years.
"Lee was sort of known as a magician, so that part's gone," Elkins said. "But with our team we can keep helping dogs like no one else."
Mannix's absence will be palpable. He exuded a dusty country-boy demeanor, a rough-hewn charisma that illuminated a huge radius. His salty tongue and facility for off-color anecdotes were offset by a horizon-wide smile and incandescent optimism. He loved to cook, swig beer and hunt and fish with his best buddies — dogs Grady, Creek and Floyd — near his Wimberley farmhouse. He turned a canine tooth from one of his first dogs, Hadley, into a silver-capped charm. His burly left arm was embossed with a loud tattoo: "The Irish Dogfather."
"There are lots of important people out there, politicians and the like," Friedman said. "But I think Lee Mannix was significant. And there is a distinction there.
"He's the kind of guy who has opened the gates of heaven wider."
A list of survivors was not yet available. Services are pending. Memorial donations may be made to the Schrodi Memorial Training Fund: http://www.schrodifund.org/.
cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649