According to a New York Times report from the time, in 1908 Paris, there resided a dog that was obviously not a nice lad. The narrative starts with a Newfoundland dog hearing a youngster call for rescue after they fell into the Seine River, Like a ye olde Lassie, the dog sought for the source of the screams before plunging into the river and saving him.
So far, everything has gone well. However, the issues arose, according to the narrative, when the dog was awarded with a good large piece of steak, which we still think is a bit of a cheap gift for rescuing an entire human infant. They had unwittingly offered encouragement for bad behavior, similar to how the colonial French rewarded individuals for rat tails. Saving children was suddenly a road to steak for the dog, and it lacked the moral fortitude to just wait for them to fall in on their own.
A few days later, another kid was playing along the Seine when he, too, fell in. The same dog leaped back into the river, saving a second youngster despite being substantially fuller of meat. The dog was fed meat once more, confirming its suspicions. For a time, the sequence of rescues, followed by meat, followed by rescues, remained. Furthermore, the quantity of children who fell into the Seine in such a short period of time appeared strange, even without taking into consideration their proximity to a single dog.
It wasn’t long before the jig was up, and the New York Times published a shocking front-page story titled “DOG A FAKE HERO” with the ominous headline “pushes youngsters into the Seine to save them and earn beefsteaks.” “Whenever he noticed a playing youngster on the bank of the stream, he swiftly knocked it into the water,” according to the New York Times, which we’d take with a grain of salt. The dog would then save the youngster, probably before pointing at some loose meat carried by the nearest adult. The dog had learnt to link drowning youngsters with a great big chunk of prime meat, much as Pavlov’s dogs had learned to salivate when hearing a bell.
