Going with the dogs
Mitchell Rudy was kicking around some ideas about helping shelter animals when somebody asked him, “Would you be willing to walk 40 dogs at one time?” It seemed a little crazy, but he could break the dog walking Guinness World Record if he could do it for a kilometer, which is a little more than a half mile. The previous record was 36 dogs, set by Maria Harman of Australia in 2018. “We decided we’d go for 40,” said Rudy, 28, who lives in Calgary, Alberta. “How hard could it be?” As it turned out, plenty. The dogs participating in Rudy’s attempt were provided by the Korean K9 Rescue shelter. “All of these dogs, some of them are from the puppy mills, some of them are from former meat harvesting areas. There’s a lot of stigma around rescues. They’re great animals, they deserve a good home, they just need a little bit of love.” He decided to attempt it with dogs from Korean K9 Rescue, a nonprofit that finds homes in the United States for stray and abused dogs from South Korea. Korean Legislation was passed earlier this year to ban the dog meat trade, but it won’t be enforced until 2027.
“Some dog trainers had worked with the dogs for several weeks before I arrived, to get them comfortable walking together,” said Rudy, 28, who does not have a dog of his own because of his hectic schedule. All of the dogs had been rescued from bad situations and nursed back to health by Korean K9 Rescue volunteers, he said. He hoped to get some of them adopted. On his first day of training, he said, he decided to try walking all 40 dogs at once, even though he’d initially planned to start with a few at a time. “Keep in mind that I’ve never walked more than two at a time,” he said. “I learned pretty quickly that going from two to 20 to 40 was a really big deal.” “Picture a lot of dogs barking and pulling in all different directions, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what it was like,” he added. “It was as chaotic and difficult as you can imagine.”
He and the trainers decided it would be best to hold 20 leashes in each hand and keep the smaller dogs on the inside to give the larger dogs more walking space. “We also figured out the appropriate leash length for each dog,” Rudy said. “The smallest dog was about six pounds, and it went up from there.” Between them all, “it was like getting on the rowing machine and doing a 900-pound pull,” he said. On the big day, all of the dogs except two were lined up at the university’s golf course and volunteers helped Rudy to gather up the leashes and grip them tightly in each hand. As he and the dogs headed out across the grass that morning, friends cheered and a representative from Guinness monitored and recorded the event.
Dog walking visions
Why are dogs afraid to go to space?
Because of the vacuum.
Why did the dog go see a psychiatrist?
He found out he was adopted.
I told my shrink I identify as a dog.
He made me get off the couch.
A police man came up to me with a sniffer dog and said, “This dog tells me you’re on drugs…..”
I said, “I’m on drugs? You’re the one talking to dogs.”
October 31st Birthdays
1950 – Jane Pauley, 1994 – Nadine Lustre, 1993 – Vanessa Marano, 1998 – Sydney Park
1996 – Mateo Arias, 1964 – Rob Schneider, 1952 – Nick Saban, 1541 – Christopher Columbus