This home intruder just wanted to steal a hug.
Hollie Mallet of Pierre Part, Louisiana, was looking through her home security footage last month when she noticed a repeated visitor to her garage — a young boy, who was dead set on hugging her dog.
Mallet has an underground fence so that her dog, a friendly black Lab named Dutchess, can roam around the yard on his own but won't venture onto the street, she told ABC News. Previously, she and her husband had spotted the boy walking into the driveway to briefly throw a ball around with Dutchess, but when they saw the footage below, they knew they had to figure out the identity of the young dog-lover.
“I’d like to tell him he’s welcome to stay and play, she loves the attention!” Mallet wrote in a Facebook post.
It didn’t take long for their neighbor, Ginger Breaux, to realize the kid was her son, Josh — who wrote that she was a little alarmed her son was sneaking onto a neighbor’s property without her knowledge, but that her heart was "melting" over how much he "adores dogs."
But now that the mystery is solved, Josh doesn’t have to sneak around anymore to see his canine neighbor.
"Since I've talked to Hollie, he's been almost every day," Breaux told The Dodo. "He's taken a few pics with Dutchess, played fetch, laid in the yard with her in the shade, runs around the yard with her or just a quick stop to pet her and say hi."
Breaux’s family previously had a dog of their own, who died last year. But she explained in a Friday Facebook post that though many people have urged them to get another dog for Josh, the family just isn’t in a place to take on that commitment right now.
“We've been planning on getting our family another dog, we just wanted to do it at a time that we felt we could devote an appropriate amount of time to start off with a new dog … Even if it's not a new puppy, I don't think it's fair for a dog to have to be alone so much when its first with a new family,” she wrote.
In general, parents should make sure that their children know not to hug or touch dogs they don't know, but this situation appears to have worked out for the best.
“[Dutchess] is so friendly and lovable, she wants to be loved on and petted and is under our feet all the time!” Mallet wrote in a Facebook comment. “We love her like our children, so glad she has a new friend now!”