Professional Dog Walkers Aren’t Sure JD Vance Has Ever Walked—or Even Met—His Dog Before

As part of Vance’s Herculean quest to come off as slightly less, err, weird, he’s bringing his dog Atlas on the campaign trail. But his approach to holding Atlas’ leash has opened an entirely new can of worms.

By Kylie Cheung  |  August 16, 2024 | 5:59pm
Photos: Screenshot Politics JD Vance
Professional Dog Walkers Aren’t Sure JD Vance Has Ever Walked—or Even Met—His Dog Before

Before moving to New York, I had a dog named Bucky who’s since been happily re-homed with my parents. He’s a 30-pound pit bull-chihuahua, and he lacks quite literally any basic survival skills. Nevertheless, there was a point when he was a flight risk who tried to bolt like a live-action Call of the Wild any chance he got. So, because I walked him several times per day, I got in the habit of practicing what dog owners and professional dog walkers call the “wrist wrap technique,” wrapping my hand several times in the loop at the end of the leash to maintain a secure grip on my 30-pound devil of a son, and also protect my hand from some nasty version of carpet-burn whenever Bucky would pull.

On Friday, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance hard-launched his German shepherd Atlas—named after the book by libertarian nerds’ patron saint, Ayn Rand—with a video, announcing he was hitting the campaign trail with him. This little campaign development is a transparent attempt to pander to the everyday American’s love for dogs, all as the latest polling shows one of the top words voters associate with Vance is “weird.” But if anything, Vance’s approach to holding Atlas’ leash has opened an entirely new can of worms—mostly because it doesn’t look like Vance has ever walked, let alone even met, his family’s dog.

In the now-viral video of Vance walking his dog up to the plane, he appears to hold the middle part of the leash rather than the wrist section. Eventually, he shifts his hand to hold that part but does so with only three fingers. Atlas is not a small dog. “If at any point [Atlas] decided to chase something, he’d be gone,” Eli Yudin, a comedian, podcaster, and retired professional dog walker, told Jezebel. “He’d probably leave a pretty big burn on [Vance’s] hand too.” Ouch! You’d think someone who’s walked his dog before might actively try to avoid that.

Yudin used to walk dogs for the Brooklyn-based small business HouseBroken, and he learned quite a few tricks of the trade in the process, including how to assess dogs with potential leash-pulling and running problems based on their harnesses. Atlas’ “EZ Walk” harness, which connects at the front, is made specifically for dogs who tend to be leash-pullers, Yudin said, which made it especially confounding that Vance would walk such a large dog with only a couple of fingers.

“It definitely stood out to me,” Yudin said. Of course, he fully expects Vance to respond to any questions or criticisms of his leash-holding technique by suggesting “liberals just don’t train their dogs well enough, and he doesn’t need to rely on the leash, or something.” To “give credit where due,” though, Yudin affirmed that Atlas’ harness and leash were all strapped and buckled in the right places. So the room full of political strategists who hoped some dog pics might help drive up Vance’s historically, comically low polling numbers got that right, at least.

I’m hardly a body language-reading truther, but, as a dog owner watching Vance’s interactions with Atlas, another observation from Yudin resonated with me: “I will also say watching the video, the dog does seem slightly aloof towards him—it does give me a vibe of a dog that’s primarily trained-slash-walked by someone else,” Yudin said. “[Atlas] never checks in with him or even looks at him.”

Another professional dog walker, Johnny Stoumbos, also weighed in on leashgate for Jezebel. Through years of experience walking dogs all over Brooklyn, Stoumbos says that watching Vance interact with and curiously attempt to walk his dog, he “assumed any responsible owner with a real relationship to the dog would know better” than to hold a leash like that. 

“Or, maybe it is a political stunt, in that he’s trying to suggest his dog is so much better behaved than all of ours that he barely has to hold the leash,” Stoumbos said. Regardless, one of the first rules that was impressed upon Stoumbos in his training was to always hold the wrist loop of a dog’s leash and wrap it around the hand—especially when walking a dog somewhere with a significant amount of stimuli, like, say, a tarmac crawling with security guards.

Again, I don’t exactly read body language analysis as science, but I’m willing to trust observational insights from professional dog walkers, and Yudin added that Atlas’ “ears and tail being down and pinned suggests he’s uncomfortable.” You don’t exactly have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe another living being might be uncomfortable in proximity to JD Vance. I can only assume Vance’s interactions with Atlas are limited to asking how many puppies he’s sired that day, lest he fail at his biological purpose and become a “childless cat boy.” God forbid. 

Since joining the GOP ticket in July, Vance has been plagued with “weirdo” allegations that he can’t seem to shake, mostly because that would require him to stop talking about childbearing quotas and children’s genitals. It doesn’t look like bringing a dog—whether it’s his is still TBD—on the campaign trail has achieved much except to raise even more eyebrows. And here I was, thinking that when it comes to American politics, there was no likability problem too big for the presence of a fluffy, adorable German shepherd to solve…

 
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