Hey. It was in Brazil. I can see a banner for Presidente Dilma Roussef over the dog´s house. But I can´t recognize the other two candidates, so I can´t say in which city this series of photos was taken. But I bet it was in the Southeast. Rio de Janeiro or Minas Gerais, I think.
I think this fortunate dog is wearing a Botafogo de Futebol e Regatas´ soccer jersey
Knowing that this would have a happy ending was the only thing that made the first pictures bearable. What a great, and lucky, dog.
Man, it’s as though we managed to breed the concept of retributive justice right out of dogs or something.
Approaches starving dog in squalid pile with ghastly looking sore:
“Human? Ear scritches? Sounds good! Ok, I’ll go with you, clearly trusting humans has never good badly before.”
It looks like this one was lucky enough to be correct; but it’s nothing short of astonishing how generously our little sucker wolves judge us.
It’s hard to find words to respond to the horrific cruelty that poor dog suffered; thank goodness for the kindness in some human hearts.
But it reminds me of a fantastic sequence in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Not wanting to give anything of the plot away for those who haven’t read it, I’ll just say that we have visitors. This scene describes their response to animal cruelty; bullfighting, in particular.
The Plaza de Toros was full when the matadors and their attendants began their professional entry. Everything seemed normal: the brilliant sunlight blazed harshly on the traditional costumes, the great crowd greeted its favourites as it had a hundred times before. Yet here and there faces were turned anxiously towards the sky, to the aloof silver shape fifty kilo-metres above Madrid.
Then the picadors had taken up their places and the bull had come snorting out into the arena. The skinny horses, nostrils wide with terror, had wheeled in the sunlight as their riders forced them to meet their enemy. The first lance flashed – made contact – and at that moment came a sound that had never been heard on Earth before.
It was the sound of ten thousand people screaming with the pain of the same wound – ten thousand people who, when they had recovered from the shock, found themselves completely unharmed. But that was the end of that bull-fight, and indeed of all bull-fighting, for the news spread rapidly. It is worth recording that the aficionados were so shaken that only one in ten asked for their money back, and also that the London Daily Mirror made matters much worse by suggesting that the Spaniards adopt cricket as a new national sport.
I can only wish that the same pain – even if just transitory – could be visited a hundredfold upon the abusers of that poor dog.
And by the way, SyFy has green-lit a six-hour miniseries production of Childhood’s End; I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
My parents did a similar thing. A customer owed my father some money for a job, but when he went to collect he found a dog in a similar state on a concrete slab in the guy’s back yard. So he took photos and then took the dog, telling the debtor that was payment in full. And if he didn’t like the trade he was welcome to take it up with the Police and the RSPCA …
That’s so funny, I was all “that looks like Brazil” after the first picture on a street.
Xeni, thanks for this. Simple and sustained compassion. Awesome.
This is what it is about. Nothing can do happy like a dog. Its the reason I volunteer for a rescue society.
Is this the original story? http://www.taringa.net/posts/imagenes/17437250/Pittbull-al-borde-de-la-muerte-es-rescatado-por-un-angel.html
Such a beautiful dog. What a complete transformation.
Thank you sir.
This story both requires a unicorn chaser and is one.
The old wolf-ape love story always strikes me as unlikely and beautiful.
Jon Stewart interviewed the lady from Pit Bulls and Parolees a little while back. It was a pretty amazing piece.
I’ve got a dog who I believed, until recently, to be a pit bull; a DNA test has revealed that she’s actually 1/4 bull terrier, 1/4 cairn terrier, 1/8 boxer, and the rest indeterminate. She’s white and looks a bit like the dog in this story – at least, looks a bit like it looks in those last few photos, once it’s started putting on some weight.
Stories like this show both the cruelty and the decency that human beings are capable of. I’m enough of an optimist to believe that there’s more of the latter than the former. It sure looks like there were a lot more people helping that dog than there were mistreating it.
I’d call that a pit bull. As I understand it, most pit-fighting dogs are mutts, and the ones that take their fighting instincts and general physique from bull terrier/boxer crosses are usually called pit bulls.
But I have no first hand experience of these things - my family’s on the rescue end not the intervention end, and we don’t take dogs anyway. So p’raps I’m just passing on uninformed hearsay?
:’ D
Nice one.
According to another Boing Boing reader this poor dog was rescued in Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro State.
Unfortunately many people still mistreat their animals . But on other hand, a lot of people work hard to help the animals. We can see many examples of this on television
I think you are right!
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