Canine Version Of Daredevil Goes All Sorts Of Lights Out On Bastard Poachers

The whole setup of Dardevil is that the bespectacled superhero tracks down and kicks the holy shit out of criminals — and he's blind! A story has recently emerged concerning one of the most ornery dogs in Montana — an abandoned Labrador/German Shepherd mix whose lack of any sort of care, love or human interaction played out in wild, unhinged aggression in his later years. Air Bud, he was not. As one more kick in the dick from the Universe, Ruger, our feisty canine protagonist, is going blind. Brutal, right? And yet, precisely like his human crimefighting counterpart, our boy Ruger is mopping up the fucking floor with bastard poachers in Zambia. And we're not talking about just a couple here and there; in less than eighteen months, Ruger the Magnificent (epithet courtesy of author) has led to the apprehension of over 150 black-hearted poachers.Born on a Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana, Ruger drew a karmic short straw, ending up with an absolute shitbag of an owner, who shot all of the puppies in his litter. Somehow, he managed to escape. With this in mind, Ruger's aversion to humans comes into crystalline clarity. Conservation biologist Megan Parker eventually found him in a Montana shelter, where Ruger's snappy, growly, "put-that-hand-near-my-face-at-your-own-peril" behaviour rendered him entirely unadoptable. Megan however, viewed his temperament as a massive plus and, along with her colleagues at Working Dogs for Conservation, she trained Ruger to signal when he spots guns, ammunition or ivory — tools of the trade for poachers. As soon as he sees or detects the goods, Ruger stops and stares at the location while the rangers retrieve the contraband and arrest the bad guys. One can almost picture a snarling poacher in a gorilla costume being led away in handcuffs, yelling, "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling shelter dog!"As his sight continues its irreversible decline, Ruger's sense of smell has gone off the charts. Demonstrating his fearsome prowess to a group of observers, Ruger located a tiny piece of ivory hidden in a matchbox in under three minutes, inspiring certain spectators to wholeheartedly conclude that they had just witnessed a bona fide demonstration of witchcraft. Silly rabbits.Now the gold standard for conservation dogs, Ruger no longer cops the "bad dog" label. Today he's hailed by his handlers, conservationists and elephants (if they could speak) as a full-on hero, and Ruger has become a model for training more dogs to take down the poaching industry. Now if only we could train one of the poachers to take out the scumbag who slaughtered the rest of Ruger's litter, this would be the feel-good story of the summer!Here's Megan Parker's TED Talk about challenging our ideas of "good dogs" and "bad dogs." It's pretty awesome and whether you're a dog person or not, it's impossible not to be draw into this utterly captivating story of purpose and redemption.https://youtu.be/3ACKGIZ6MZo