Dog Blogging

… In 2017, Tim Walz made Gus a promise. If he won the election for Minnesota governor the following year, the family could get a dog. A high-wire and stressful campaign season unfolded over the next several months. But despite the craziness, his son didn’t forget. (He wasn’t the type: Several years before, he delivered a detailed PowerPoint presentation on why they should get a cat. “To be honest, the fight for the cat was one of Gus’s premier projects,” Walz told reporters at the time. “Sold my wife.”)

Walz won the election in November 2018 with 53.8% of the vote. His children congratulated their father…and then came to collect their prize.

Before Scout was the First Dog of Minnesota, he was Gene, an abandoned rescue. At 11 weeks old, someone left him and his nine littermates on the side of a rural road in Oklahoma. Many had crawled down and gotten stuck in a ravine right before a rainstorm. A woman named Kathy discovered them. With the help of her son, she coaxed them all out before the area flooded. They knew if they didn’t get them all out now, they never would.

The litter was taken in by the Minnesota-based nonprofit Midwest Animal Rescue and Services. One by one, they gave each one a temporary name. One male in particular—described by MARS to Vogue as “very calm, slightly nervous, and well behaved”—was called Gene…

They posted an adoption listing for Gene online. Within several days, MARS had an application from the Walz family. They rechristened him as Scout. “I’m proud that Minnesota’s First Dog is a rescue dog, and I hope Scout—who has been a very good boy—serves as a reminder for Minnesotans that there are a lot of pups waiting to be adopted,” the governor said at the time.

Scout settled in well to the Governor’s Mansion in St. Paul. He played frisbee in the backyard with the governor. He drove with his family to Dairy Queen for Pup Cups. He frequently snuck cat food from the bowls of his feline sibling Afton, and later Honey. Oh, and he ate his dad’s glasses before a COVID-19 press briefing. (The Walz family tells Vogue that if Scout had a motto, it would be: “If I can reach it, I can eat it.”)…

A year later, the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate. As soon as the announcement broke, Matt Nelson, the man behind the wildly popular Instagram account WeRateDogs, said he was flooded with notifications about Scout. “I believe we were tagged in [or] sent this tweet no less than 200 times in the minutes after it was posted,” he says. So he reposted it on his account—and it quickly went viral among his four million-plus followers.

Nelson wasn’t surprised. Walz, a former school teacher and high school football coach, felt relatable and familiar to many Americans. His tweets about Scout only furthered that perception: “It is simply a guy having a very human, normal reaction to something their dog did. For most of my audience, they can see their dog doing what Scout did and they can see themselves saying ‘this damn dog’ in response,” he says. But Nelson also believes it showcases something else: his character. “He’s a rescue,” he notes. “I’ve been in this dog internet space for nearly a decade, and I can say that there are few better subtle indicators of character than choosing to adopt an animal in need of a home.”

When Vogue first broke this gripping story, before the DNC convention, JD Vance felt it incumbent upon himself to procure a totally not rented, much more classy professional-type dog of his own to show off. (It’s quite possible the poor thing does live in the Vance household, but I don’t think he’s had much chance to interact with JD… )

This fool has no idea how to hold a leash. It’s going to take a lot more than a rented dog to make him not weird.
pic.twitter.com/m3AWsuRcE0

— Marlene Robertson (@marlene4719) August 16, 2024

Vance: Nobody kidnap my dog because we want him back pic.twitter.com/EYX3jVKOZK

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 16, 2024