Are Dogs Really Man's Best Friend?

Check out the story of Hachiko, a loyal Akita who waited for over ten years for his master to return. Learn more about Hachiko and loyalty in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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

(00:26):
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

(00:47):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:53):
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.

(02:16):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:57):
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.

(03:21):
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

(03:42):
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

(04:02):
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

(04:26):
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

(04:48):
a Dog really a Man's Best Friend? On how stuff
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