It’s National Dog Day, so let’s talk about a dog who definitely found a way to carry on during World War II: Rip the dog.
Rip’s story starts during the Blitz, that long and terrifying period when Nazi bombers were attacking towns and cities in the UK, particularly London.
The raids hit military, industrial and civilian targets; families would spend the night in shelters and wake up to find homes, businesses and neighborhoods bombed out and burned down.
And they’d help the victims, do as much cleanup as they could, and get on with their days, before doing it all again the next night.
One day an air raid warden in east London came across a dog who appeared to be on his own, with no home and no food.
He took the terrier-cross back to the local Air Raid Precaution post, figuring that he’d make a fine mascot.
But the dog turned out to be much more.
Rip, as he became known, had a nose for finding people who’d become trapped in the buildings damaged in the Nazi raids.
He hadn’t been trained to do this, he just knew where to find people, even in the rubble and fire.
And Rip also somehow knew how to approach them without making the situation worse.
First, he’d sniff and scratch around for signs that the person was still alive; then he’d start barking so the person knew that he was there… and human rescuers knew that he’d found someone.
He did this time after time during the Blitz: over twelve months in 1940 and 1941, it’s said the dog helped save at least 100 people.
That spurred the human powers that be to train other dogs to do search and rescue work.
And it prompted them to recognize Rip’s extra special skill: he won something called the Dickin Medal, which is sort of like the dog version of the UK military’s prestigious Victoria Cross.
Rip wore that medal on his collar for the rest of his life.
And in 1948, he was buried in a cemetery in east London along with a number of other Dickin medal winners.
Rip’s headstone reads “‘We also serve,’ for the dog whose body lies here played his part in the Battle of Britain.”
The children’s museum in Spartanburg, South Carolina is home to a statue of a very special dog.
After several years of working with her psychology professor owner, Chaser the dog could identify over a thousand objects by name, the largest vocabulary of any dog on record.
That’s why the statue refers to Chaser as the “Smartest Dog In The World.”
Medal for Dog Rip, Who Saved 100 People, Fetches 24,250 Pounds (Bloomberg via Archive.org)
Smartest Dog Ever Can Pick Out 1,022 Toys By Name (Popular Science)
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Image via Wikicommons