There are a lot of bad reasons to surrender a dog you took responsibility for. Near the very top of the list sits this one: giving up a dog because you’ve decided he’s gay. In March 2022, that’s exactly what happened at a shelter in Albemarle, North Carolina, when a dog was dropped off at Stanly County Animal Protective Services after his owner saw him mount another male dog and no longer wanted him. The story that followed is partly about one lucky dog, and partly about how quickly a cruel decision can be undone by people who know better, and by a couple who had heard that particular flavor of ignorance aimed at them for decades.
What actually happened
According to the shelter, the previous owner surrendered the dog, whom staff named Fezco, specifically because he’d humped another male dog. Anyone who has spent five minutes around dogs knows where this is going, but it’s worth stating plainly because a dog paid for the misunderstanding. Mounting is ordinary canine behavior with a long list of non-sexual causes, and reading it as a statement about a dog’s sexuality is a category error that says far more about the person than the pet.
The shelter posted about Fezco on Facebook, describing him as roughly four or five years old, about 50 pounds, and friendly with both people and other animals. The post traveled fast, picked up by local and then national outlets, and even drew a curious public aside from Cardi B, who wondered aloud on social media whether dogs could be gay. The attention did what attention sometimes does at its best: it found the dog the right home.
The couple who understood
Steve Nichols and John Winn, an openly gay couple who had been together for more than three decades, saw a news report about a dog facing the same kind of prejudice they’d navigated for 33 years. They recognized the shape of it immediately, and they decided to act. After completing the adoption, they gave the dog a new name with a deliberate wink: Oscar, after Oscar Wilde, the gay Irish poet and playwright.
As Nichols pointed out to reporters at the time, what troubled him nearly as much as the stated reason for the surrender was the state the dog was in. Fezco had apparently been underfed and poorly groomed, and he arrived with heartworms and unneutered, both of which his new family set about addressing. The “gay dog” framing had grabbed the headlines, but the quieter story was a dog who simply hadn’t been cared for, now landing with people determined to fix that.
The science the original owner skipped
The whole ordeal could have been avoided with a moment of curiosity. Same-sex behavior is common throughout the animal kingdom, documented in well over a thousand species, and some biologists argue it has played a meaningful role in the evolution of animal social behavior. But the more relevant point for the average dog owner is narrower: mounting between dogs is usually not about sex at all.
“Humping is one of the most misread behaviors dog owners encounter,” says Dr. Ravi Mehta. “It shows up with overexcitement, during play, when a dog is stressed, or as a bit of social posturing, and both males and females do it. It’s not a window into a dog’s sexuality. When it becomes constant or compulsive, I’d want to check for a medical cause or an anxiety issue, but on its own, a dog mounting another dog is just a dog being a dog.”
That’s the whole of it. A behavior that’s normal, common, and easily explained cost a dog his home, and only luck and a couple of decent people gave the story a good ending.
Why it still resonates
Years on, the Fezco-to-Oscar story keeps circulating, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a clean little parable about prejudice, the projection of human hang-ups onto an animal who has none of them, and the people who quietly refuse to let cruelty be the last word. Nichols and Winn didn’t set out to make a statement; they saw a dog being punished for the crowd’s ignorance and offered him a couch instead. The best rebuttal to intolerance, it turns out, can be as simple as a name, a vet visit, and a home. The dog was renamed for a writer who spent his life being punished for who people decided he was. Fitting, then, that the correction here required no argument at all, just somebody willing to look at a dog who had done nothing wrong and treat him accordingly.
