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In 1876, Hambletonian died, and he made the front page of The New York Times.
Hambletonian was a horse: “the most celebrated sire of trotting horses in America,” as The Times put it. A father to 1,500, an earner of $30,000 a year in the 1800s, Hambletonian could add to his achievements being one of the first animals to receive a New York Times obituary — a rare feat, even rarer today.
The Times no longer publishes obituaries for animals, and it doesn’t typically run coverage of animals that have died.
“Obituaries, really, are summations of lives — of people,” said William McDonald, the Obituaries editor. “You can’t really give that kind of treatment to an animal, a dog or a horse. It would look a little incongruous to see an animal’s story on the obituary page right beside men and women who lived exemplary lives, accomplished things.”
Instead, for an especially accomplished or famous animal, The Times occasionally runs news items or the rare “appraisal” — a more subjective variation on an obituary, often including the first person or personal anecdotes from the writer. They’ve nearly always run in other sections: Sports, for Triple Crown-winning race horses, like Secretariat, or show dogs, for example; Metro, for animals with New York ties, like Gus, a “neurotic polar bear” that swam obsessively in the Central Park Zoo — “as if prepping for the Polar Bear Olympics”; National or International for pets of presidents, like Fala, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Scottish terrier; Culture, for animals that held prominent movie or television roles.
This week, Uno, the first beagle to win Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, received one such appraisal. Most show dogs aren’t universally well known enough to warrant coverage in The Times. But Uno visited the White House (where he received a special collar); traveled on Midwest Airlines (and once got wanded at security); and made regular public appearances, where people recognized him on the street.
“There aren’t that many animals out there, really famous animals, that you’d want to contemplate an obit or an appreciation for. Uno just was captivating,” said Richard Sandomir, the obituaries writer who volunteered to write the appraisal for the Sports desk over the weekend. “How many animals have a bobblehead of them? Uno does.”
For Mr. Sandomir, the first-person appraisal with personal anecdotes “was something I felt I almost had to do.” He used to cover Westminster during his 25 years on the Sports desk, had known Uno and in 2008 followed him to St. Louis, where Uno “threw” the first pitch before a Cardinals baseball game. (To account for his anatomical pitching limitations, Uno fetched the ball from Fredbird, the Cardinals’ mascot, instead.)
“It’s kind of selfish,” Mr. Sandomir said. “I wanted to write about my time with Uno.”
There have been some notable exceptions, or near-exceptions, to the practice of excluding animals from obituaries. In 1931, The Times published an obituary for Igloo, the white fox terrier belonging to Rear Adm. Richard E. Byrd, which joined his famous explorations of Antarctica. “Few men number among their friends the men of prominence whom Igloo came to know,” The Times reported. “President Coolidge patted his head. President Hoover petted him. … Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh knew him well.”
The obituary, however, still ran two pages behind the rest of the obituaries and death notices section.
“I don’t think there’s any rule that says we can’t do it,” Mr. McDonald said. For now, animals will remain off the Obituary pages, but not excluded from the rest of the paper, where exceptional animals — “if this animal made a mark in some way,” as Mr. McDonald defined it — might still be memorialized in other ways.
In the case of Uno, it was a no-brainer.
“It was a delightful experience to cover Uno, and sometimes it was delightful just to watch his effect on other people,” Mr. Sandomir said. “Once he was the champion, he was basically the only beagle in the world to many people. People would stop him in the street and ask, ‘Is that Uno?’ He’s the very embodiment of Snoopy and Underdog.”
Jack Begg contributed research.