Running with the Loveable Dog, the Bounty Hunter

Running with the Loveable Dog, the Bounty Hunter by Roxanne McDonald

Dog the Bounty Hunter is in one respect just another reality TV show (on the crime-fighting circuit rather than in the game show vein). But in another respect, it is a unique experience, taking viewers inside the grittiest of lifestyles and extracting the hardest of messages.

Yet, further, the balls-to-the-wall bounty-hunting family expose a most rare and unlikely strain of hard-asses.

If you watch a few episodes, you will be struck by the unusual tone of a show that one would think would be of bad guys resenting and good guys denouncing, etc., etc.. The tone, instead, is one of absolute spiritual reclamation. Notice how when Dog and his posse

catch a guy who has bailed on his bail, they chat him up, give him tough love but love, and urge him to get help…all while riding in their big brute of an SUV on the way to the pen. So, by the time the captured con is being ushered into the local jailhouse, he is thanking Dog and telling him he LOVES him!

There’s terrifying criminal, for example, named Walter Jardine. He has 25 priors—terroristic threatening; burglaries; addictions to ice. He is, Dog admonishes his team, “a chunker who will throw down crazy” when cornered by the bounty hunters. The guys go to great lengths to find, track, and capture Jardine, who is a tall, bald, somewhat angry-looking man in the police mug shots.

In handcuffs and in the back seat of the SUV, he is tame, calm, and almost childlike in speech. He confides in Dog about his problems and issues, and Dog advises him, all the while injecting the lingo of the island, like “Bra” and “bra’ man”. As Jardine is escorted out of the vehicle and into the jailhouse, he says, “I love you, Dog.”

The only time I have ever witnessed hardest of thugs express such deep endearing feelings was in the twelve-step programs where recovering and recovered dope fiends found hugs, love, and God a better way than knives, drugs, and death.

Then there’s the next case, a Tammy Nakasame who is an illusive drug addict and major drug dealer.

When Dog and his boys (son, nephew) aided by Dog’s soulmate wife, Beth find her and handcuff her, they search her purse and find a handful of bags of dope (crack or speed). This typically sends Dog over the top, as he lost a son to a drug dealer. But Dog lovingly chastises Tammy, then gets his team to dump the dope and pour soda on it to destroy it. He then goes over to the young kids watching the whole scene and asks, “Now what did we find…?” The kids reply, “Rocks, Dog.” And Dog very softly explains that 15 minutes of high turns into 15 years of jail, etc.

As Tammy is treated as kindly as the other captures on the episode, Tim and Leland speak to the camera about how unusual it is for Dog to be so good with a drug dealer who is selling that stuff to kids to maintain her own high. Leland says, “I never seen my dad be that friendly to a drug dealer before.”

And Tim (aka Youngblood) jokes, “I think the [nicotine withdrawals from Dog cutting way down on his 4-pack-a-day habit] are goin’ to his head.” But the nicotine withdrawals can’t be the excuse for every episode—wherein the unusual bounty hunter Dog slows down crime but spreads love.

On his official website, you can see photos of Dog, who looks like he has had his share of banging and getting banged about, and you can understand the philosophy that propels the man who prays with his team before and after every hunt and capture. As his saying might explain, “You have to run with them in order to catch them.”

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