Featuring Jon Endo and his Shiba Inu, Sunny.
Story and images by Jenn Lin © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
“When my wife and I decided to get Sunny, we initially got him as a bit of a warm-up to having kids. We were at the tail end of COVID and we thought it would be a good time to look for dogs that were being given up. Sunny was 5 months old at the time. He was very friendly off the bat, which was very different from most Shiba Inus. He really warmed up to us right away. The previous guardians named him Sunny and we decided not to change it because we wanted him to be comfortable. I wasn’t too attached to having a dog or a cat, but once we found Sunny, we both fell in love with him.
When I first got my family dog, we were just little kids and didn’t really know how to train or socialize it, nor did we have easy access to that information. Our Pomeranian was just full of energy and really out there. So the one thing that I was deathly afraid of, was if a bigger dog were to come by—how would we handle it? We didn’t know what to do. In my neighbourhood where I grew up, there were not many dogs. And if a person had a dog, it was a guard dog. So you wouldn’t see too many well-trained small dogs.
Thanks to content you can find on the internet nowadays, specifically content that vets and dog trainers publish, my wife and I were able to find the right breed for our lifestyle. We didn’t want to get a dog and make it depressed because we weren’t meeting its needs. So when YouTube started getting real content in the early 2010’s, in one day I think I watched 30 videos on dogs. Which is a totally normal thing you can do now, but back then it was a lot harder to access that kind of information.
Humans overthink, overanalyze, misinterpret… and this can totally screw up how we interact with one another. For dogs, they can’t speak but they can somehow communicate. They’re just there. I think we can learn something from it. For me, I haven’t had a dog in like 20 years, so having Sunny restored my humanity and reminded me of how to love everyone again. I’m so glad we made this decision because it brought so much love into our household. He fits right into our family and our personalities match so well.
The experience of having a dog for me now is so different and so new; I just kind of feel like a kid again. And the dynamic is a lot different—having a dog between myself and my partner versus me and my family. Everything I learn from him just makes me happy. For instance, learning how he reacts to new food, a new toy, or a new place. You can tell he’s not happy when you give him the food he doesn’t like. He’s got like this ‘death threat energy’ where silence speaks volumes and his eyes pierce, you know what I mean? I’m not scared of him, but I’m scared of him. I gotta be the alpha but I don’t like to show it.
Sunny has a lot of personality. He always wants all the attention. If we have guests in the house and they’re ignoring him, he starts barking. He reminds me a little bit of my old dog. If I was playing a video game and he wanted attention, he would grab this doll we had and lay it in front of me; that was his signal. When Sunny wants physical affection, he rests his snout on your lap and looks at you… or he’ll come up and throw a sock at you! Like a cat, he’ll lean into you on the couch. So I’ll start petting him, but then he kinda twists over and exposes his belly, and then I’ll just hold my hand over him and he’ll look at me. Slowly he’ll use his paw to drag my hand down to his belly. If I pet him, he’ll continue to look away in ecstasy… but if I don’t pet him, he looks at me like, What are you doing? It’s all in the eyes. It’s almost like I can feel what he’s saying with his eyes. It’s insane how much he communicates with me.
The first time I realized I had a connection with Sunny was when the motherf****r picked up a dead rat when he was 6 months old. He’s a really good dog and I love him to death, but every so often he pulls off some crazy shit. So anyways, at the time I didn’t know it was a rat. We were out walking in the rain and he found this carcass in the bush. I was still training him on ‘drop it,’ and he knew the command, but he wouldn’t drop it. Instead he shook it and a water droplet ended up on my lip. Immediately, I thought about this kid in BC that died from rabies a few years ago, so this quickly escalated and became the most horrific moment of my life.
I let out a muffled scream and that’s when Sunny dropped the rat. I rushed to the hospital only to be told I had to go and find the carcass to be treated. It turned out to be the bottom half of a rat. The doctor said they’d give me a tetanus shot since only bats have rabies (not rodents). I thought, oh my god, the prick knew! It was if Sunny looked at me and was going hehehehe. I was so mad that I told my friends afterwards that I was gonna barbecue my dog that weekend.
The next time we were out, he found another dead rat in the bush, a huge one, and pulled it out. I was like, Dude, NO! and he dropped it right away. Some time afterwards, when I got him a rope toy to play with, I realized what he wanted to do with those rats. He just wanted to bring them to me and play with them.
During Sunny’s puppy stage, I remember a time when our property tax was coming up. No one wants to pay taxes, right? Everyone’s initial reaction to taxes is always like, ughhh… so looking back at it now, I think he noticed our energy shift. The day the property tax letter finally came in the mail, we opened it up, sighed, and placed it down on the table where he couldn’t reach it. But do you know how dogs tilt their heads? He was doing that. My wife and I decided to head out for a quick lunch and to get groceries. When we came back, the property tax notice had been shredded, but it was all placed neatly in a pile—not everywhere in pieces.
Sunny was just looking at us, smiling, like he did us a favour. I remember thinking, oh no, what are we gonna do? How are we gonna pay it? What number do we need to contact? When Sunny realized he did wrong, he was like, uh oh, I thought it was okay for this one! And then he ran away. So that’s when we knew that Sunny is always paying attention. … We eventually pieced the letter back together and showed it to Sunny. He looked at it, and then he looked away. He never ripped up any other document after that.
Thinking back on the whole situation, it taught me to be more careful with how I react. Sunny is always taking cues from my behaviour. It’s like when a guard dog sees you act cool with a person, and so they’re also cool with them. If you show any fear towards a person, they’ll be ready to defend you. Sunny has this total innocence to him because he doesn’t understand human concepts like rabies or property tax. Even though he can’t talk, he shows us every day that he loves us, and that he wants our love.”
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Dogs Will Teach You Love 