This will break your heart.
Rhian Lubin reports for the Mirror, March 17, 2016, that a dog in Russian Siberia refuses to leave the spot where his human was killed in a car crash in 2014. The loyal dog waits on the side of the road, hoping and waiting for his owner’s return.
People began noticing the dog standing beside the road, and tried to catch it. When it refused to be captured, kind animal lovers started feeding the dog, and they even put a kennel beside the road. But the kennel was too near to the road and was destroyed by a truck.
A new kennel was built for the dog a few weeks later in the village of Berkut, near the town of Yalutorovsk in south-central Russia’s Tyumen Oblast region. But the dog returned to the roadside and continues to wait for its owner.
Animal activist Anastasia Selina said: “We haven’t been able to get anywhere near the animal, it only seems to want to get to its previous owner and as far as we know they didn’t survive the car accident. It doesn’t trust anyone else, and will not even let anybody even stroke it. We advise people not to disturb it, because we are worried it might run under a car if it gets scared.”
Despite the cold weather this year, the dog has survived a second Siberian winter, thanks to motorists throwing food out of the window.
The dog has been named the “Siberian Hachiko” – after the Japanese Akita dog who is remembered for his remarkable loyalty to his owner. Every day, Hachiko would wait at Tokyo’s Shibuya Station for his owner to return, appearing precisely when the train was due at the station. Hachiko continued to wait for many years until his own death.
A campaign has now been started to find a home for Siberian Hachiko and to capture him once and for all.
H/t FOTM‘s CSM
~Eowyn