The dogs stopped him in his tracks.
Jeff Olsen was hiking when he spotted them – lean, strong, alert, moving with the kind of quiet ease that makes you look twice. They were hiking with their humans, and beautiful in a way Jeff hadn’t seen before. He put them at tens on every scale. But what struck him most wasn’t how they looked. It was their presence – calm, peaceful, contemplative.
He asked about them and learned they’d been rescued from desperate circumstances in Taiwan and brought to the States through an informal network of volunteers working across both sides of the Pacific. Jeff was smitten. Their humans offered to introduce him to some of those volunteers. That was the spark that lit the fire.
Within weeks, he knew he wanted to be a part of it. He met the people who had built this rescue network – here and in Taiwan – heard their stories, and felt something shift. Two months after that conversation on the trail, his first foster dog arrived: a survivor from the streets of Taiwan who, along with his sibling, were found living beneath an abandoned car.
Jeff’s home became something like a summer camp. Three or four dogs at a time, rotating through as fosters found their families. Mornings start with brisk three-to-four-mile hikes through local parks and trails, the pack setting off in a happy mob. Afternoons bring shorter neighborhood walks – strangers stopping to delight, ask questions, sometimes leaving with adoption in mind. By evening, everyone piles in, worn out and content. The whole rhythm is built around one thing: showing these dogs, many of whom have never had reason to trust a human, that the world can be kind.
Over five years, Jeff has fostered around 45 dogs and helped each one find a home. It’s real, meaningful work. But he felt the gap between what he could offer one dog at a time and the scale of what was needed. That frustration didn’t diminish what he was doing – it pushed him toward something more.
He’d been giving to HSSV since 2016 – quietly, starting with $500. The closer he got to individual dogs and the networks that saved them, the clearer it became what an organization like HSSV actually makes possible: the medical care, the transport, the capacity to do at scale what no individual network can. Jeff saw in HSSV a partner with the infrastructure to match his ambition for these animals. In recent years, that quiet $500 has grown to between $20,000 and $40,000 annually, and the partnership has grown with it.
When asked why, he doesn’t talk about HSSV in the abstract. He talks about reach.
“HSSV allows me to help animals I may never meet,” Jeff says. “Their work reaches farther than any one person can. We want them all to have a chance.”
He also talks about the bond – the one between a dog and the person who loves them. Jeff believes that bond is worth protecting, and that not every family can do it alone. The giving is an extension of the same impulse that made him open his door to a dog found under a car on the other side of the world: if you can help, you help.
Jeff has decided to help as much as he possibly can.
About Formosan Mountain Dogs
Strays and village dogs from Taiwan are sometimes called Formosan Mountain Dogs – descendants of the island’s primitive indigenous dogs, who evolved naturally for centuries without influence from modern man-made breeds. Many of the rescued dogs today – the strays, the injured, the sick – are remnants of that original gene pool, random-bred rather than selectively shaped. Their physical traits are simple and handsome. And their temperaments, perhaps surprisingly, tend toward the sweet, quiet, intelligent, and agreeable.
These traits aren’t unique to Formosans. They show up across other so-called “primitive breeds” as well. The dogs are innately wise, and don’t automatically trust humans – but with careful work, they become gems. For Jeff – and countless others – befriending these dogs and earning their trust is hugely rewarding.
