Johnine has a rule: if she sees an animal in danger, she has to do something about it.
Like any real estate agent, Johnine spends a lot of time driving. She previews properties, scouts out neighborhoods, drives clients through the city. And when you’re doing that on the day-to-day—well, as you might imagine, Johnine’s rule has led to quite a few atypical days.
A while back, Johnine was in Meadowbrook, previewing possible properties for some buyers. She was driving down 107th—a quiet, neighborhood street—when she saw a German Shepherd walking in the same direction. No leash, no owner. Nothing to stop him from walking one block farther and ending up in the middle of the much busier cross street ahead.
Johnine stopped. She had to meet a client that afternoon, but she also had a rule. Johnine checked for a tag, but the dog did not have one. He did not even have a collar. So Johnine called animal control.
No one answered.
Johnine had no choice but to let the German Shepherd jump in the back seat of her car and ride with her until she could take him to animal control herself. The dog was nervous, pacing back and forth and covering the seats with dog hair, but Johnine cares about animals. She cracked the windows and continued previewing houses. At one point, she came back from a house and found the dog sitting happily in the driver’s seat, waiting for her to return.
Johnine had a tiny gap in her schedule before her one o’clock meeting with her client, and she made the most of it. She drove to Seattle animal control, but only to find it closed. So she drove to its administrative offices.
“I need help,” she told them. “I can’t take this dog to my appointment, but I can’t let him loose in the streets.”
Animal control’s administrative offices are not designed for holding pets, but they agreed to take the dog anyway. Johnine is persuasive like that.
During Johnine’s meeting, animal control found out that the dog had been chipped, so they contacted his owner. The story behind the dog’s wandering: his owner had abandoned him. The owner decided he no longer wanted his beautiful German Shepherd, so he dumped the dog on the streets.
Johnine isn’t the type of person who can do one good deed and move on. Once she helps someone or something—which is often—she stays committed. So she took pictures of the German Shepherd and posted them on Facebook. She told all her clients, past and present, about the dog.
“That’s just the kind of dog Jeremy was looking for!” one client wrote on Facebook.
That client adopted the dog, and now the German Shepherd has a loving home.
Sometimes the life of a real estate agent is unpredictable. You end up driving around with a strange dog and hunting down animal control. But, as if our work wasn’t rewarding enough, sometimes that unpredictability means an abandoned German Shepherd finds a home. Any day that leads to something like that is a good day in our book.
German Shepherd photo by Ellen Levy Finch
