Jindo pup tangoes with deer—and luckily limps away

Meet Belle, Rick and Euna’s loveable-but-headstrong Jindo

Adopting a new pet is always something of an adventure. When Rick and Euna went to adopt their new pup, they added a transoceanic twist to the mix.

“That was actually my wife's idea, because she's from Korea, so she was familiar with the breed,” Rick says. “She got in touch with this group of folks who foster strays and shelter animals, and they found Belle wandering around a farm—just a little puppy who had been abandoned by her mom. So, they held onto her, took care of her before we went over to Korea to get her.”

He continues, “She's a well-traveled dog. We took three flights—one from Busan to Seoul, then one from Seoul to San Francisco, and then we flew from San Francisco to Atlanta—and she did very well. She slept most of the way!”

Belle quickly got comfortable at her new home in Georgia, where she had a big yard in the big city. Rick says, “Jindos often have a lot of space to [roam]—they live in the country usually, right? So, when she saw a big backyard and a big front yard, she was like, ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh!’”

However, that yard wasn’t quite big enough to avoid a surprising intruder, leading to this Hambone award nominated incident.

What happened?

Rick and Euna have a large, fenced-off deck where Belle could lounge, explore and play without getting into trouble—or so they thought.

“I had a meeting,” Euna remembers. “Belle just kept bugging me like, ‘Euna, would you play with me?’ So, I just let her out on the deck [thinking] she could not escape—but we didn't know her shoulders were small enough at the time, she figured out [a way].”

Euna turned away for just a moment, and Belle squeezed her way through the bars to confront an intruder in the backyard.

Rick adds, “A lot of deer wander around back here; there's basically a game trail behind our house [and] this time some of those deer were in our backyard. Unfortunately, this deer was not a doe—it was a buck, and he was not happy. One thing about Jindos is they're extremely brave, but it wasn't enough to keep her from losing that fight.”

Euna ran outside to rescue Belle and rushed her to the veterinary hospital. She was clearly injured, but Euna unsure just how seriously.

Euna recalls, “I thought one leg was gone or something, like totally broken, because it was right next to her ear, and she didn't want to move it at all.”

Fortunately for Belle, she only sustained some soft tissue damage. After a few days of careful observation, she was fully recovered and back to her normal self, “bounding around, sniffing everything, happy as a clam,” Rick says.

How Nationwide helped

A surprise tussle with a large, wild animal like a deer could have resulted in serious injury and high costs for emergency veterinary care.

Belle emerged from her deer experience with a few scratches, and luckily Rick and Euna had Nationwide in their corner to help with veterinary bills early on (amazingly, this was Belle’s first claim!).

When asked why they chose to protect Belle with Nationwide, Rick cites two major reasons: “Help with emergencies, like what this whole story's about—because emergency care is expensive, and emergencies are unexpected. Also, making it very, very easy to file a claim, because it literally took me five minutes to do it and within a couple of days Nationwide had gotten back to us.”