In Tokyo, at the Shibuya Station, there is a statue of a dog named Hachiko who would come and greet his master every day after week, even after his master died.
In Moscow, there is a statue of a dog named Malchik at the Mendeleyevskaya station. But Malchik was a stray, one of the many canine geniuses who have learned commute to work begging for food on the Moscow metro . Malchik was stabbed to death by a deranged Russian model, and the people of Moscow erected this statue in commemorative outrage. This is just one of the many new details about Moscow’s strays in this Financial Times story on the subject. Among other tidbits: the strays learn to pretend to be asleep, waiting for little old ladies and other easy marks for free food to wander by, at which point they start wagging, sighing, getting excited, and in general seeming to have a special affinity for the human sucker about to part with their own hard-earned survival resources.
