An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs. Mikita Brottman

that it’s difficult to admit they’re not far from my own: He loves coffee cake but dislikes asparagus, likes cartoons but gets bored by foreign films, likes white bread but not tortillas. Moreover, last Christmas, writing in my left hand, I added “Grisby’s” shaky signature to mine and David’s at the bottom of our Christmas cards, reversing the R as if he were still learning to write. I’ve projected onto Grisby, it seems, the stereotype of a child with Down syndrome: comical, captivating, and always up for a cuddle.

      Such children are famously lovable, but adults with the same condition are often shunned, especially since weight gain is a common side effect of neurological medication. Similarly, precocious children can be delightful, but infantile adults are disturbing, their sexual maturity sitting uncomfortably beside the child’s lack of self-restraint. In the same way, dog owners who write or speak as their dogs can do so comfortably only when their dogs are “fixed”; a blog or video giving human voice to a dog’s sexuality would be not cute but unsettling. Chop off his balls, however, and he can be a fat child forever.

      I can’t speak on behalf of other dog owners (or their dogs), but I suspect I’ve given Grisby this kind of personality as a way of connecting my adult and childhood selves. He is, in other words, a “transitional object”—a phrase coined by the child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to mean a personal possession, like a teddy bear or security blanket, that helps the child feel safe away from home. Transitional objects are not limited to childhood. Adults, too, need things that remind them of their private worlds: personal photographs used as screen savers, lucky charms, religious icons, sports mascots—anything with a stable meaning that can avert loneliness, mediating between the familiar world of home and the impersonal workplace or public realm.

      Dogs make very handy transitional objects because we can use them as outlets for all kinds of different emotions. In my case, Grisby forms a bridge between my inner life and the “real world” out there, toward which I’m increasingly ambivalent. On the one hand, I want to function successfully as an adult in the wider world; on the other hand, I want to stay at home, regress to infancy, and keep the outside world at bay. It’s always easier to make this difficult transition with a friendly bulldog by my side.

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       HACHIKŌ

      HIDESABURŌ UENO, A professor of agricultural science at Tokyo Imperial University, always took the four o’clock train home from work, and every day, his dog, Hachikō, would be waiting for him on the platform at Shibuya Station. When Professor Ueno died of a cerebral hemorrhage in May 1925, in the middle of a lecture, his gardener, who inherited his house in the Kobayashi district, also adopted Hachikō, and for the next ten years, this golden-brown Akita would return to Shibuya Station every day to meet the four o’clock train, hoping to see his beloved master again. In 1935, Hachikō’s body was found in a Tokyo street. His remains were stuffed, mounted, and put on display in Japan’s National Science Museum. A bronze statue of the famous dog stands outside Shibuya Station to this day, and he also has his own memorial by the side of his master’s grave in Aoyama cemetery.

      Interestingly, Hachikō isn’t the only dog whose statue oversees a railway station. In 2007, a memorial was erected at the Mendeleyevskaya station on the Moscow Metro in honor of Malchik, a stray mutt who lived there for about three years, becoming popular with commuters and Metro workers. Malchik claimed the station as his territory, protecting travelers from drunks, the homeless, and other stray dogs. In 2001, after getting into an altercation with a bull terrier, Malchik was stabbed to death by the other dog’s owner, a psychiatric patient with a long history of cruelty to animals.

      Heroic dogs like Malchik and Hachikō continue to appeal, growing even more famous and beloved as time goes by. Hachikō has been the subject of two children’s books and two movies, the more recent of which—Hachi: A Dog’s Tale—starred Richard Gere as the Professor Ueno figure. In 1994, millions of radio listeners tuned in to Nippon Cultural Broadcasting to hear a newly restored recording of Hachikō’s bark, and in 2012, enthusiasts queued for hours to see an exhibition of rare photographs from the dog’s life. To his fans, Hachikō was unique, perhaps even miraculous in his devotion. Yet to those with a broader view, Hachikō’s story is simply the most recent variant of an ancient and widespread folktale motif: the Faithful Hound.