Post A Pup Sundays! DOGUE Magazine, Tim Walz's Scout, Octavian's Last Run; Post Your Babies, Tell A Story, Memes and Etc.

On October 23, 2023, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota received an urgent text from his wife, Gwen. It wasn’t about her. Or their daughter, Hope. Or their son, Gus.

It was about their dog.

“Scout locked himself in our bedroom somehow,” she wrote. “There is no key.”

The governor reacted with a question mark. Then, he screenshotted their conversation and posted it to X. “This damn dog,” he tweeted.

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.”)

Nine months after his January inauguration, Walz scheduled a press conference. The reason? “After months of searching, planning, and dodging questions, the Governor is prepared to make good on a promise he made to his most demanding constituents: his kids,” read the statement. On Thursday, September 5, at 4 p.m., he introduced Minnesotans to their First Puppy: a three-month-old Labrador retriever mix named Scout.

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.”)

In 2023, the Minnesota Governor’s Residence needed repairs. So the Walzes leased Eastcliff, the official residence of the president of the University of Minnesota. That’s where Scout really got into trouble. He had no problem opening doors at his old house. But when trying to get out of the bedroom at his new one, he accidentally turned a lock and trapped himself inside. (Or at least that’s the theory: “We still don’t know how he did it,” the family says.) As the Walzes panicked about how to get him out, Scout snoozed away soundly on the bed, only waking after workers climbed a ladder and broke through an open window.

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.”

But even if Scout is technically a rescue, the Walzes do want to make something clear: “He rescued us as much as we rescued him,” they say.

Photos: Tim Walz

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Sorry about last week...

I must start announcing hiatuses, but I always find out when it will be too late. Until the last minute, I always think I can pull something worthy out, and that just isn't true. Children are unpredictable, and I have four humans and five animals. My animal babies are elders now, slowed down but also with the needs of senior dogs and cats. I won't even mention our cockatoo, who is like having a perpetual 3-year-old who acts like a nosey old neighbor lady. He has to know everything we do, and he only likes one petsitter, so leaving on holidays is not very easy. He holds grudges and seems to blame me when we come back. My house is organized in slight chaos, but I wouldn't have it any other way. 

My heart is a bit heavy this week as we are in the process of saying goodbye to our German Shepherd, Octavian "Tavi". He has been the heart of the pack, the leader, protector, and loyal, and he never fails to know when my husband is coming home. Lately, he slowed, and I knew something was wrong when he could no longer look out the window to watch him coming up the walk to the door. We all did. His eyesight is failing, cancer of the bones, and he's simply old. Tavi has had a fantastic life; he's a road dog, accustomed from puppyhood to traveling to some wild places, cuddling babies and watching over them, sleeping with the kids, and now our last was his last charge, and he knows he can say goodbye. We have cried for weeks, but now he will run again with the best friends we lost over the years. They will welcome him to the bridge and wait for us to join them one day.