Leāo: Faithful 'Til The End

Like many people who like dogs, I cried unstoppably the first time I watched the movie Hachi,  based on the real story about a dog who faithfully waits for his master's return sitting at a train station, until the day it dies.

The movie works not because it has an interesting or very complicated plot --in fact the story is as straight-forward as it can get: man finds dog/man keeps dog/man dies/dog waits for man/dog dies. That's it.

And yet the movie is emotionally charged because it resonates at a very primordial level. There's something about such a display of fidelity in an animal that we humans find incredibly moving. Possibly because it unconsciously reminds us that our success as a species is in no small part owed to our productive association with our four-legged friends.

And with that in mind, I introduce you to Leāo (lion in Portuguese), a dog that has faitfully sit in front of his master's grave (tragically killed by the recent floods and mud slides in Brazil) for the last two days:

A dog, "Leao", sits for a second consecutive day, next to the grave of her owner, Cristina Maria Cesario Santana, who died in the week's catastrophic landslides in Brazil, at the cemetery in Teresopolis, near Rio de Janiero.

 "(He) won't move from there eventhough we fed him outside (the cemetery). He sniffes at the grave and sits down again. And each time there's another burial he raises the head, as if thinking we're going to take his mistress out" said Marcio de Souza (cemetery caretakeer) to the Reforma newspaper.

There's probably a very good reason why Dog is the invert of God; and like all dog lovers in the world, I feel that if there are no dogs in heaven, then it's a place I don't have much interest in visiting.