'Anderson Cooper' Bites Anderson Cooper

A dog, and the CNN host were involved
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 15, 2017 3:40 PM CDT

Anderson Cooper recently bit Anderson Cooper and pulled him to the ground. The Anderson Cooper doing the biting was a police dog in Norfolk, Va. The Anderson Cooper who was bitten was the CNN host. It was all thanks to his interest in Spike's K9 Fund, a nonprofit that Cooper did a story on two years ago. It works to get bulletproof vests on police and military dogs at a cost about $2,500 each. Cooper has since been a donor and fundraiser and just this week aired a 7-minute segment about the organization and its co-founder, Jimmy Hatch, the Virginian-Pilot reports. It was while filming the segment for CNN's weeklong Champions for Change series that Cooper's canine namesake—a dog Cooper had outfitted with a vest—bit Cooper's elbow, though without injury to the host.

"Jimmy somehow convinced me to suit up so I could experience the power and discipline of these dogs," Cooper explained of the protective suit he had donned, something a suspect being attacked by a dog obviously would not have. Hatch, a former Navy SEAL who founded the K9 Fund after seeing military dogs shot to death in Iraq and Afghanistan (one of whom, he says, saved his life), asked Cooper if he felt how "intimate" the dog's bite was. Hatch tells the Virginian-Pilot Cooper responded with a look that seemed to say, "What the hell is intimate about a dog trying to rip my arm off?" In the first two days after Cooper's CNN segment aired, donations to the nonprofit jumped to more than $30,000; typically, it gets just a few hundred dollars a week. "He's done so much," says Hatch. (More Anderson Cooper stories.)

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