It sounds like the beginning of a long-winded joke:
He'd had enough of being at the animal shelter, so Scout the dog climbed over one tall fence and then another, crossed a busy highway in the darkness, entered the automatic doors of a nursing home down the road, walked unnoticed into the lobby, hopped onto a couch, curled into a ball and quietly went to sleep for the night.
An astonished nurse there found him the next morning...
But it's not a joke. Scout is very much real. And his determined effort to install himself in a local nursing home is one for the ages:
The pup was a "stray mutt." The shelter staff knew nothing about him other than he had the hallmarks of an abused dog, including some sort of hard pellets lodged in his jaw from where some sicko apparently shot him.
After he was found in the Bellaire nursing home, the sheriff came to take him back to the shelter. Uh-uh. Scout wasn't having it:
[A] few nights later, there was Scout, back on that same couch in the nursing home lobby.
Yes, once again he'd climbed two fences, managed to cross a highway without getting pancaked, and surreptitiously gained entrance to the nursing home.
So they sent him back again. And then he came back.
They didn't want to send him back a third time. He was too endearing. Plus, it was really a waste of law enforcement resources.
So they kept him. And Scout is kind of living the high life. He wanders the facility freely. He has "learned how to get into [patient] rooms by jumping up and using his paw to pull down on door handles." He's become a friend to everyone there. And he remembers which of his new friends have the dog biscuits.
Perhaps most movingly, the pup is earning his keep:
He can sense [when someone is dying]... We had a resident that when he was passing away, Scout wouldn't leave his room. He makes a good nursing home dog. He knows his job and he's good at what he does.
Excuse me for a moment.
We're lucky to have dogs in this world, and even luckier that some of them are like Scout.
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