In 2016, Tessie Johnson and her family went to KC Pet Project, a shelter in Kansas City, Missouri, to adopt a dog. Their eyes immediately fell on a 4-month-old Rottweiler puppy with a pronounced underbite, who’d been picked up as a stray.
“He was the cutest thing ever,” Johnson told The Dodo. “They were saying that normally it’s easy to have puppies adopted because everyone loves puppies. But because of his teeth, a lot of people were turned off by him. And because he’s a Rottie, people also weren’t interested.”