The story of Seattle’s bus riding dog has gone viral, and is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face today.
Seattle’s mass transit schedule is a bit of a challenge for two-legged riders who can read, but commuting from an apartment home in Seattle to the dog park in Belltown on the bus alone, is no problem for Eclipse, an intelligent and beautiful Black Lab/Mastiff mix.
The urban pooch began riding the bus alone quite by accident. Eclipse and her owner Jeff Young, were in the habit of regularly riding the bus to the dog park in Belltown together, until one day when Young’s pre-ride smoke break took too long for his prompt pooch, who jumped aboard without him, and rode to her destination alone, where she then waited for him to catch up, riding on the next bus.
“She’s been urbanized totally,” Young told reporters. “She’s a bus-riding, sidewalk-walking dog. If we get separated, she gets on the bus without me and I catch up with her later.” I personally would be terrified in her place, but as we know, this would never happen with a cat. People do worry though. “Probably once a week I get a phone call. ‘Hi. I have your dog Eclipse here on 3rd and Bell,'” Young recounted. “I have to tell them, ‘no. She’s fine.’ She knows what she’s doing.” A spokesman for Metro Transit said the agency loves that a dog appreciates public transit, but adds; “She would be much safer in the world if she had her owner on a leash,” he joked. “It makes their day,” says Young. “It’s a good part of their day and it works out for her so I just let it go.”
In a city where smiles are often as scarce as the sun, Eclipse gets a lot of petting, and prompts amazed smiles as she now regularly commutes, untroubled by her owner’s occasional tardiness.
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