Pit bulls have a fearsome, and largely unfair, reputation as dangerous dogs. But the truth is that a dog is only as good or as bad as its owner. As any pit bull owner will attest: if you treat a pit with kindness it will repay you with kindness in turn. They’re not mean unless raised to be. To illustrate this point consider the following story.

Simba the pit bull lives in Sweden in an apartment complex with his owner Arjanit Mehana.

According to The Dodo Simba’s owner says he is a friendly dog but that one neighbor, an elderly woman, was always afraid of him:

“He always tried to greet her, but she called him mean and looked at him with fear. She never liked him because he was a ‘bad’ breed.”

But Simba soon won her over by proving that he is indeed a very good boy. When returning home with his owner Mehana recently Simba began acting oddly when passing the neighbor’s door. He had noticed something no one else had, as Mehana told The Dodo:

“He stopped. He began to bark and run to the door where the neighbor lives. I pulled the leash but he refused to come.”

When Simba refused to move Mehana was on the verge of picking him up when he heard what his dog had: his elderly neighbor calling for help.

“I heard a weak voice shout for help. She said, ‘Please don’t go.'”

When Mehana and Simba entered the woman’s apartment they found their elderly neighbor collapsed on the floor with a broken hip. Desperate and unable to move the woman had been waiting two days for help before the keen-eared pit bull had heard her cries.

After Mehana called an ambulance and he and Simba waited with her, the woman expressed her thanks. As Merhana told The Dodo:

“She said, ‘Thank you for hearing me.’ I thought she was talking to me at first,” Mehana recalled. “But then she said, ‘No, not you — the nice doggie.'”

Mehana told The Dodo that he hopes Simba’s heroic act will help improve the reputation of oft-maligned dog breeds like pit bulls. And, indeed, it seems like Simba is winning people over, one neighbor at a time.