COWICHAN LAKE, B.C — Amanda Richter will always remember that day she noticed a face you can’t forget.
“It was like a Picasso painting,” Amanda recalls of the unique dog she saw while scrolling through social media. “Everything is out of place, one eye’s big, one’s little, his nose is twisted.”
She contacted the animal shelter that posted the picture right away, and after meeting Brodie fell in love even faster.
“It was his cuteness and feeling sorry for him,” Amanda says. “It was just this massive amount of emotions.”
Staff at the shelter told Amanda that the dog’s deformity was caused by his mom, who bit him when he was two weeks old, leaving Brodie’s jaw partially shut and one eye blind.
“But he has a zest for life,” Amanda smiles. “He loves everybody and he’s just happy-go-lucky all the time.”
After Amanda adopted the dog hours after meeting him, other people who’d seen the pup’s picture asked the shelter for updates. So Amanda started posting pictures of Brodie online.
“It‘s just him being a goofball,” Amanda laughs. “Just being himself.”
Just being Brodie has inspired almost two million people to follow him on his various social media accounts, countless others to create all sorts of art inspired by him, and at least one person to get a tattoo of the canine on their calf.
“I can’t believe he’s blowing up,” said Amanda, who assumed only local people would be interested in the dog. “He has a cult following almost. It’s insane.”
Even more unimaginable was Amber being told about a similar looking dog at a shelter in Texas, adopting the pup named Raven, and enlisting a team of volunteers to transport her to B.C.
“They’re the best of friends now, like ying and yang,” Amber says. “They love each other so much. It’s pretty cute.”
While Brodie and Raven have since been profiled in print around the world, from the U.K.’s Sun, to D.C.’s Washington Post —plus an appearance in People Magazine — Amanda says she’s not sharing pictures of her pups to generate publicity, her goal is to inspire empathy.
“It’s saved my faith in humanity,” Amanda says. “It’s very nice to know that there are so many people who can look past differences and love and animal who might not be perfect.”
