Mitch the blind dog
Mitch had been abandoned in an outside kennel at an Indiana animal control facility on a cold Saturday night in January. The shelter is closed on the weekends, and there had been a pattern of people dumping their dogs in these kennels on those days. As a result, a husband-and-wife team who run a local rescue group regularly checked the kennels on weekend nights during the winter. If they found a dog left in those conditions, they'd take it home and keep the animal warm and safe until the shelter re-opened.
That's when they found Mitch, a blind Husky, tied up to one of the kennels. The wife emailed us to say, "It was my opinion that such a pretty dog with such a gentle disposition was adoptable even if he was blind. I posted pictures of Mitch and the info about him on Petfinder and other sites. To my dismay we have not received one inquiry." She asked if we'd be able to provide a home for him at the sanctuary.
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We flew Mitch from Indianapolis to Minneapolis and on to Bozeman, Montana, where we picked him up at the airport. (He was too big to fly on the smaller regional jets that service the Missoula and Helena airports.)
We quickly found out this handsome boy is a high-energy, always-on-the-go kind of dog. He's very sweet and loves attention. But he's also an "alpha" with a dominant personality, which means his social skills aren't always the best when it comes to getting along with other dogs. So when he's not being supervised, he spends his days in a large dog yard by himself. He has plenty of other dogs around him for company in adjoining yards, but he isn't in a position where he can push them around.
Mitch is a perfect example of showing how a disability like blindness doesn't prevent an animal's true personality from flourishing. People may think becoming blind would make a dog meek and submissive, but that's usually not the case at all. On the other hand, Mitch's blindness did not contribute to, or worsen, his dominance issues. It's just who he is.
Being a Husky, he's got the ideal "attire" for Montana winters. When the other dogs are ready to go back inside on a cold day, Mitch is still running around, enjoying the crisp, cold weather and wondering why everyone else is heading indoors!
Posted November 2009.
