Emotional Support Dog: Why the Poets Got This Right

Alexander Pope, the great English poet, said, “Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”

Robert Louis Stevenson said, “You think dogs will not be in heaven?  I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.”

Mark Twain is widely credited with saying, “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.  It is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”  This last line circulates so often, in so many versions, that its exact origin is genuinely hard to pin down with certainty.  Whoever said it first, the observation holds.

Pope was not exaggerating for effect.  History has a real, documented case proving his point better than any poem could.

Professor Hidesaburō Ueno, who taught in the agriculture department at Tokyo Imperial University, brought home an Akita puppy named Hachikō in 1924.  Every morning, Hachikō walked with him to Shibuya Station.  Every afternoon, at three o’clock, the dog returned to meet the train bringing him home.

In May 1925, Professor Ueno suffered a fatal brain haemorrhage while teaching.  He never boarded that afternoon train again.  Hachikō showed up at the station regardless, at three o’clock, exactly as always.

He kept showing up.  For nearly ten years, Hachikō returned to Shibuya Station every single day, waiting for a man who was never coming back.  He died on 8^th March 1935, aged eleven.  A statue built in his honour in 1934, while he was still alive, stands outside the station today, one of Tokyo’s most recognised landmarks.

No friend keeps a decade-long vigil for someone who has already died.  Most human loyalty comes with conditions, convenience, or an expiry date once the relationship stops serving a purpose.  Hachikō’s loyalty had no purpose left to serve.  Professor Ueno could give him nothing more.  The dog returned anyway, for years, because that is simply what the bond demanded of him.

Twain’s line about the starving dog captures the same asymmetry from a different angle.  Rescue a man from poverty, and gratitude is never guaranteed.  Rescue a dog, and the bond becomes unconditional almost immediately.  Stevenson’s line about heaven is not really about the afterlife at all.  It is a wry, pointed observation that most dogs have already earned whatever reward humans still have to work for.

Pope, Stevenson, and whoever actually wrote the line credited to Twain were not writing sentimental greeting card material.  They were making an accurate observation about comparative loyalty, and Hachikō spent nearly a decade proving it correct, one empty afternoon train at a time.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code