I picked up a bait dog the other day, abandoned at a park, injuries all over his face and legs. An open wound on his hind leg. He’d snap if your hand went anywhere near his head .

But when I brought him back to the shelter, he responded to the women while growling at men. A man must’ve hit him, repeatedly.

I named him Wyatt- In honor of a puppy that we’d just lost to a freak accident.

While tossing and turning all night; I figured that we couldn’t just leave him at the shelter. In the metrics of animal control, he was just another dog. Just another number.

He’d be deemed as human aggressive in 72 hours and euthanized- that much I knew.

So I contacted people who care, those don’t take NO for an answer- who stop at nothing.

Those people were;

A woman; not intimidated by a gargantuan sum of money a trainer asked to neutralize Wyatt’s human aggression.

A man who pleaded with others to save Wyatt’s life and then stepped up himself; willing to risk his 10 other pets and learn how to deal with an aggressive animal.

The overall figure we needed to raise ran well over 2500$.

As donation after donation came in and friends responded to our pleas to donate, I asked myself- WHY WYATT?

Why do we expend all our resources to save one dog- just because he has a story while hundreds other die at the shelter because their story isn’t sad. Because it doesn’t get Ooh’s and aah’s and likes on FB.

The unfortunate become the fortunate.

Is Wyatt’s life more important than Paris’s life? The quiet, shy pit bull who died amidst our last minute pleas to save her.

Sometimes we see so much cruelty around us that one dog becomes a SYMBOL.

A symbol that we will not allow cruelty to win over love.

It’s still just one life and NO Wyatt’s life is not more important than any animal that is euthanized.

But we root for the under-dog. We look for the unfortunate ones- and try to make them fortunate.

We try to make LOVE win- because we DESPERATELY need to believe that good wins over all evil.

Wyatt is well on his way to recovery- while several have died un-noticed.

Both we and them have been the unfortunate ones.