Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from how stuff works dot com? Welcome to the How Stuff Works Podcast. I'm editor Candice Giftson, joined today by two of my best friends in the office, Brior Josh Clark,
and editors. Hello. So we're talking today about whether or not a dog is really a man's best friend or a woman's true Short answer to this is yes, of course, but illustraining this concept with the story of a Japanese dog and a key to new named We're all big fans of how Chico here at how stuff works dot com. A little background around the office. Candice wept openly when she read this article. Um, it was amazing. It was
an amazing site. Uh and we now use it as a measuring stick to determine whether, well how much humanity one of our coworkers has. And a long story short, Um, this one of our one of our poor coworkers, is now considered a robot because she did not actually Uma will cry at this article. So, um, we're all big fans of hu Chiko. Somebody want to give some Chiko background A Chico. I'd love to give some background on hachik.
His nickname was Hatchi. Essentially, he was a professor's dog at a Japanese university and they were very close, so close in fact, that Hitchiki would walk the professor to work every day at the train station and then wait for him at the train station when he came home at night. And this continued for say ten twelve years,
Is that right? Yeah, I'd say about that. And then one day, very tragically, the professor actually died while he was at school and never returned, but Hichiko, undaunted waited for him at the train station. He continued to come every day and look for the professor even though he
wasn't coming home. And it got to the point that people started to notice that the professor's dog clearly needed a human being to belong to, so they gave the dog to another family, but he routinely escaped from home and returned every day to the train station in a very um sad, Victorian orphan kind of way. He contracted all sorts of diseases. Yeah, he he got the mange.
He became a little, uh, little street warren. I guess you could possibly say, although they cleaned him up pretty well, he's now stuffed at the Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. Um. Even what they did, he's white as a whistle here. Um that they buried his bones next to the owner. Yeah, so had she goes in two places at once. Um, we're here around here on the office. We actually had a pretty big debate over this article. Um. I when I wrote it, Chris actually edited. Candice had
nothing to do with except for crying. Um. The some of the wording got changed. Originally I that Chico waited patiently, and we had something of a debate cannad dog wait patiently? Um? Or was what was I just anthropogenizing it? Well, no, anthropogenizing it. You have to say it with the hitch right after. We'll see. The thing is at how stuff works.
You know. One of the big things that we strive for is to be as as scientifically accurate as possible, and you know, we don't want to attribute these feelings to a dog. But this is one of those things that I'm actually kind of glad that we had the debate about, because this is uh, this you know, obviously this can't be quantified scientifically. But if you look at Chico coming back day after day and fighting with other dogs and catching you know, doggy diseases on his way
to the train station. Um. You know you've got to say that that's I mean, obviously, you know, he could have been waiting for people to give it more treats. It could have been something, you know, very survivalistic. But it doesn't seem that way. It seems like he was loyal. It seems like he was waiting patiently, so sure, And I mean he was doing this long before people started
giving him treats as well. Um. And also, there's been studies that have shown that dogs are capable of displaying or at least exhibiting um secondary emotions like jealousy, shame, pride, guilt. And I think any dog owner knows that, you know, the dog can feel emotions, can show emotions, including ones that are supposedly just relegated to humans and chimps um. So I don't think saying that he was waiting patiently
was anthropomorphizing him. Well. I think it's just simply one of those situations where you know, we were airing on the side of caution. I think it's up to everybody to make up their own minds, and you can make up your own mind too, Candice when they read is a Dog really a Man's Best Friend? On how stuff works dot com Exactly. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let
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