The world is full of monuments of cats and dogs. In every corner where a human beings lives there can be found t least one bronze, wooden or stone pet for sure. The desire of people to immortalize themselves is understandable, but why do they put statues of cats and dogs by their side?
In Leon, for instance, there is a monument of greyhound Ginford who is said to save a kid from the snake’s bite, or, according to another version, from a wolf’s attack. The locals honored the dig as a saint and a patron of children for a long time, and the fact that their saint had four legs did not bother them much.
At the entrance to the dog’s cemetery in Paris you can see the monument created in honor of St. Bernard’s dog Burry. This dog has saved forty people lost in the mountains. According to one version, the forty-first man killed Burry as he has mistaken it for a wolf. But a more optimistic version says that the forty-first man was a kid, and Burry found him in the snow, warmed him and carried to the village where this wonderful dog continued to save people’s lives for another twenty years.
In the Central Park of New York there is a bronze statue of a Siberian Eskimo dog Balto which pulled the sleigh for about one thousand kilometers in a storm and saved the children by delivering them anti-diphtheria serum. This story became known world wide thanks to the Disney cartoon. Thus, Balto was immortalized twice – in bronze and in cinema.
These monuments were created to honor the memory of the heroes in the animal world, but the cases when seemingly ordinary pets were given recognition as well are not rare.
In Edinburgh there is a statue of sky-terrier Bobby which has spent fourteen years near his owner’s grave. Sometimes he went to the nearest restaurant where people gave him food and where he could escape from bad weather. Bobby died on this grave and was buried at the gates of the cemetery, nearby his owner.
In the Italian town Borgo-Saint-Lorenco, on one of the bus stops, a monument to a dog Fido is standing. Fourteen years the dog waited for his owner to arrive on the bus not knowing that his owner died during the bombing attack of 1943. “Fido. The example of fidelity” is written on the monument to this dog.