A viral video of a dog allegedly being abandoned by his owner on the side of the road turned out not to be what it seemed, but it still ended up being good news for the dog.
Stephen Sage Silver was driving near Ming Lake in Bakersfield, California a few days ago when he saw a man with a dog on the road. He began recording video, which shows a man walking toward his vehicle, trying to shove a dog away from him. The dog wants to follow the man, but he keeps shoving the dog away. The man then got into the vehicle and drove off, with the dog running alongside.
Silver followed after and the man stopped his car. “I told him ‘Hey what are you doing?’” Silver said. “He said he didn’t own the dog and that it was just following him.”
Thinking the dog was being abandoned, Silver continued to shout at the man but when the man approached his car, Silver became spooked and backed off. Afterwards, he reported the alleged dumping to Kern County Animal Services (KCAS).
A KCAS officer went out to the area and found the black Pit Bull mix and brought him to the shelter, naming him Anakin, according to Bakersfield.com.
But a further investigation revealed that the dog did not belong to the man in the video, identified by 23ABC News as Danny Powell. Powell told the news station he would never do that to an animal and that he came across Anakin and gave him some food, but afterwards the dog wouldn’t leave him alone. His neighbors corroborated that the dog was not his.
Unfortunately, as is sometimes the case with viral videos, there was lash-back from animal lovers, some believing that Powell was really abandoning a pet and others angry at Silver for posting a “fake video.”
Silver later told 23ABC News he regrets sharing the video on social media and with the media company who distributed it.
Although sharing the video may have caused some unpleasantness both for Powell and for Silver, it ended up to be good news for Anakin, who got adopted on Monday (February 11, 2019) with Kern County Animal Services (KCAS).
A couple in Bakersfield who lost their previous pet to cancer will take Anakin home later this week.
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