Gratitude for Dog Lovers and Kindness

This post is to express my deep gratitude for the literally hundreds of people I met today in an emergency, every last one of them offering their help or encouragement in some way.

On Wednesday we adopted a dog from the shelter. A 10 month old husky shepherd mix, big, around 60 lbs. He had been abused in his previous home, and the shelter people had come and taken the dogs there away after complaints from neighbors alerting them to the situation. When he got home with us he was skittish and anxious.

Tonight he escaped our backyard through a feat of daring-do I should have, but didn’t, anticipate, leaping around 8 feet to get out. I was right there, but he’s so fast. He’s like a horse. He’s so new that he doesn’t fully trust me yet, so he wasn’t about to come when I called. I’m not 100% sure he’s even heard the name that was on his paperwork before yesterday. What followed was a foot chase that eventually led into active traffic, and then a car-based grid search of all of West Seattle when he got away from me there.

My wife was working the Facebook pages, the West Seattle Blog, the subreddits, and more while I drove around aimlessly, trying to stay cool. As people started seeing the internet, they started literally dropping their evening plans to join the search. We had a group chat going, and tens of people I’d met earlier that night, faces I recognized leaning out of car windows in traffic to point me the right way down the road, ended up just sidling their car up to me at some point hours later to a tell me places they’d seen him in their own search. Some sightings were literally miles away. Total strangers were up past midnight combing the streets looking for my dog. Every time I saw someone loitering near a business, or just walking down the street, I stopped to ask if they’d seen him. Every single person told me they would look for him, asked how to contact me. It had to be hundreds – it was a nice night before it got cold. People were calling my phone with a sighting, then those people would join the search too in their cars.

The outpouring of human kindness was so moving. What’s the opposite of heartbreaking? Heartwarming is too prosaic. It was heart-healing. Some reports have Seattle as the most dog-having-est city in the world, so that’s surely part of it, but it didn’t have to go this hard. I feel like I met fully 1% of West Seattle tonight, and every single one of them was overwhelmingly, utterly kind. In such a stressful moment, it meant so much to me. It’s a stressful moment for all of us out there, gestures broadly , but people still just used their Friday night to help a stranger find their lost dog.

We’ve had him only one full day. He’s had four walks. But somehow, he found his way home some time past midnight, after traveling (based on confirmed sightings) at least 5 miles. He just showed up, covered in a pound of mud, like nothing happened. I guess he knew he was home, because the people here show such easy kindness. Me too.

Thank you so much to all the anonymous Seattleites I ran into tonight. Special thank you to Anne Marie, Keyah, Chris, Ebony, Ebony’s lovely friend whose name I didn’t catch, the teenagers enjoying themselves questionably in the parking lot, and the folks outside Shadowland. I’ll never forget the outpouring of kindness I experienced.