R.I.P. Kabosu, the real Shiba Inu behind the Doge meme
Kabosu was 18, which is at least 90 in human years
The internet lost a legend today. Kabosu, the real-life Shiba Inu that inspired the seemingly eternal Doge meme, has died. She was 18, which is past the point most dog-to-human-years charts cut off, so her admirers can rest assured that she lived a long and happy life well into senior citizenship.
Kabosu’s owner, Atsuko Sato, shared the news on her blog today. “She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her,” Sato wrote in Japanese (via a BBC translation). “I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner.” According to previous announcements, Kabosu had been suffering from liver disease and leukemia since at least 2022.
Sato adopted Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would have otherwise been put down in 2008. Two years later, she took the photo that would go on to change the internet forever (and probably not for the better) of her new pet with her paws delicately crossed on the couch.
It’s a cute photo, sure, but no picture could ever be cute enough to make up for the havoc it would wreak on the digital landscape for years to come. The whole thing started off innocently enough: people began sharing the photo with generally misspelled comic sans overlays meant to illustrate the dog’s inner thoughts, thus birthing sweet Kabosu’s evil Tyler Durden alter-ego, Doge. Despite a common misconception, Doge isn’t the one who inspired nails-on-a-chalkboard phrases like “Doggo” and “Pupper”—that’s been attributed to an Australian Facebook group called Dogspotting—but she certainly can’t have helped the situation.
But furthering the cringy belief that dogs don’t know how to spell isn’t Doge’s only crime. The photo later became an NFT that sold for a whopping $4 million (via BBC), even though every teenager with a Reddit account already had it saved somewhere in their files. This then led to the inexplicable popularity of Dogecoin, currently worth $23 billion, and the eventual favor of Elon Musk, who briefly replaced the Twitter logo with a photo of Doge before saddling us with the even worse X logo a few months later.
But none of that is Kabosu’s fault! Aside from not killing off Tyler Doge-den when she had the chance, we’re going to go out on a limb and say Kabosu was completely innocent of all of Doge’s transgressions, and was definitely way more concerned with sticks or tennis balls or something than the inner workings of the blockchain. R.I.P. Kabosu—hopefully, wherever you are, the dogs have better grammar.