On October 23, 2023, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota received an urgent text from his wife, Gwen. It wasn’t about her. Or their daughter, Hope. Or their son, Gus.

It was about their dog.

“Scout locked himself in our bedroom somehow,” she wrote. “There is no key.”

The governor reacted with a question mark. Then, he screenshotted their conversation and posted it to X. “This damn dog,” he tweeted.

In 2017, Tim Walz made Gus a promise. If he won the election for Minnesota governor the following year, the family could get a dog. A high-wire and stressful campaign season unfolded over the next several months. But despite the craziness, his son didn’t forget. (He wasn’t the type: Several years before, he delivered a detailed PowerPoint presentation on why they should get a cat. “To be honest, the fight for the cat was one of Gus’s premier projects,” Walz told reporters at the time. “Sold my wife.”)

Walz won the election in November 2018 with 53.8% of the vote. His children congratulated their father…and then came to collect their prize.

Nine months after his January inauguration, Walz scheduled a press conference. The reason? “After months of searching, planning, and dodging questions, the Governor is prepared to make good on a promise he made to his most demanding constituents: his kids,” read the statement. On Thursday, September 5, at 4 p.m., he introduced Minnesotans to their First Puppy: a three-month-old Labrador retriever mix named Scout.

Before Scout was the First Dog of Minnesota, he was Gene, an abandoned rescue. At 11 weeks old, someone left him and his nine littermates on the side of a rural road in Oklahoma. Many had crawled down and gotten stuck in a ravine right before a rainstorm. A woman named Kathy discovered them. With the help of her son, she coaxed them all out before the area flooded. They knew if they didn’t get them all out now, they never would.