Thanks, Joshua Nipp, for caring

Joshua Nipp, thank you.

Thanks for giving a damn when you saw an injured dog near a Waimea Canyon lookout. Thanks for caring enough to stop and check on it. Thanks for realizing that this wounded animal was alone and needed help.

Thanks for wrapping it up with towels, placing it in the back of your pickup truck, and driving it to the Kauai Humane Society, where a veterinarian performed surgery on it. The dog needed 30 stitches along the cut on its interior rear leg and abdomen, and another 20 stitches for a cut along the elbow portion of its front left. Thanks for saving its life.

There are not many people who would do what Joshua Nipp did. A picture of the 10-year-old, 45-pound, brindle-colored dog taken the day Nipp helped it shows it standing, alone, staring toward numerous parked cars and one man walking in the distance. Perhaps Nipp was the first to notice it. Perhaps he felt obligated because it collapsed at his feet. His comment to The Garden Island, in its story published Feb 3: “It looked me in the eye and fell to the ground. He was a friendly, beautiful looking dog and I could see in his eyes that he wanted to live.”

It did live, was returned to its owner, thanks to Nipp, who went beyond what most of us would do.

This dog wasn’t the first stray on Kauai. Sadly, it won’t be the last. More than 1,000 strays come to the Kauai Humane Society each year. Where do they come from? Owners that no longer want them. Perhaps they got lost or escaped from a yard. Maybe they were a present that didn’t work out. Could be that someone couldn’t find a rental home that would allow dogs, so they just let dropped their dog off somewhere and drove away.

Either way, there are more dogs out there wandering, lost, trying to find their way home, assuming they had one. They won’t all have a happy ending, like this one, because they won’t all run into people like Joshua Nipp.

But wouldn’t it be nice if they did?