Patrick Stewart had a few words of thanks for the dog who’d just licked his face. In a video he shared on March 8, 2017, he bent down to meet Ginger at the door. He and his wife, musician Sunny Ozell, were welcoming their first foster pit bull.
Stewart was 76. He could remember being uneasy about meeting a neighbor’s pit bull in Brooklyn. That dog, Sadie, got into the habit of resting her head on his leg when he came home tired from work. By the time Stewart was in Los Angeles working with the ASPCA against dogfighting, he wanted to foster a pit bull himself.
Lesley Brog knew a dog who needed a place to stay. The founder of Wags and Walks had brought Ginger out of a Los Angeles-area shelter and into her rescue. Ginger was waiting at a Best Friends adoption center when the ASPCA asked Wags and Walks to help find Stewart a foster dog.
What he noticed when he picked up the paper
By March 9, Ginger was snoring on the couple’s couch. Stewart took that as a compliment. Three days later he shared a clip of the two of them having a Sunday nap, with a short note about which of them was making the noise.
The surprise, Stewart told People, was how he felt when he read the paper or watched the news. After seven or eight days with Ginger, he found it easier to feel hopeful about where the world was headed. He credited the dog with bringing patience and a sense of fun into the house. “I literally find myself more optimistic than I was, and there is only Ginger to account for this,” he said.
Stewart and Ozell wanted to adopt her. They spent part of the year in England, though, and Ozell later wrote that bringing Ginger there under British breed restrictions would have meant taking a risk with her life. Ginger went to another family. In her goodbye to Ginger, Ozell said they’d keep in touch as often as they could.
Patrick Stewart at San Diego Comic-Con, 2019. Photo by Gage Skidmore (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0.
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