Faithfulness and fraudulence

Dogs who remain faithful to their masters and mistresses after their deaths have plenty of aah factor, always have done.

Take Hachiko the Akita (pictured above), for example. Every day he would meet his owner, Professor Ueno, off the Tokyo train. One day, Prof Ueno died at work. Unable to take it in, Hachiko padded down to the railway station every day at the precise time of the arrival of what should have been his master’s train for the next nine years until, to much sadness, as you can see below, he expired in his own right. Read all about him here.

When Navy Seal Jon Tumlinson died in Afghanistan on 6 August 2012, his inconsolable Labrador, Hawkeye, kept vigil at his funeral

Below, you can see Leão purportedly lying by the grave of his master, a victim of floods in Brazil in 2011. Actually, it is more likely that Leão was the gravedigger’s dog and was simply chillaxing. He doesn’t look overly grief-stricken, does he?

Britain’s most famous graveside vigilist is, of course, Greyfriars Bobby. He was almost certainly a fraud, too. Both of him. According to Wikipedia, “he was originally a stray that hung around nearby Heriot’s hospital, but became such a nuisance the hospital gardener threw him into the graveyard. James Brown, the curator of the graveyard, was fond of Bobby’s company and began to feed him to keep him around. Visitors saw Bobby and liked to believe he was loyally staying by his masters grave, and provided Brown with tips to hear Bobby’s “story” …  in May or June 1867 the original Bobby died and was replaced with a younger dog.”

Lots more faithful dogs here. All the dirt on the Scotch fraud pictured above here.