Is your significant other willing to do the “double check”?

by Michael Broad · October 16, 2021

Nathan Winograd has a nice way of checking whether your significant other, or significant other¹ to be, is worthy of your time and affections. Nathan Winograd and Jennifer, his significant other, always doublecheck what they’ve driven passed beside the road because sometimes that “object” looks like it might have been an abandoned animal in need. Or it might be an injured animal but either way it needs to be checked in case it is a sentient being in need of help.

Is this a dying cat or dog besides the road or a piece of bark against which a dog had peed? Photo: Nathan Winograd.

And Winograd provides a nice example (see above) of the sort of thing that would get you guessing. Sometimes what you see is fleeting because you see the object late and you’re perhaps going quite quickly. That’s why you should always doublecheck if you think it might be an animal in need.

And he quotes a story about his sister who was driving along the road with an ex-boyfriend. She thought she saw a squirrel on the road and asked her boyfriend to turn around to check. He refused to do it. She told Nathan that at that moment she realised that her then boyfriend was going to end up being her ex-boyfriend.

And it seems that the Winograd family call it the “double check”. And it also seems that with Nathan and Jennifer it happens a lot. He calls them “phantom injured animals along the roadside”.

Often it’s just a bit rubbish or foliage or in the case of the photograph on this page which he supplied it was a bit of bark against which a dog had peed. He turned around to double check. You can see why because it just might have been an injured animal perhaps hit by a car but alive requiring urgent veterinary treatment.

He says that it is pleasing that there are more people prepared to do a double check than there were in the past. The ‘doublecheckers’ are increasingly common. It is nice to know that Nathan is optimistic on that topic.

Note 1: In case you’ve never hear the term ‘significant other’ it means boyfriend, girlfriend, potential boy/girlfriend, partner or spouse.

P.S. Winograd is described as “The voice of America’s displaced pets and the conscience of the animal sheltering industry” by The Bark.

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