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“I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner,” Sato wrote.
As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday was unknown but Sato estimated her age at 18, past the average lifespan for a shiba inu, with her birthday celebrated in November.
In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Sato took a picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa.
She posted that image — with the fluffy shiba inu giving the camera a beguiling look — on her blog, from where it spread to online forum Reddit and became a meme that bounced from college bedrooms to office e-mail chains.
The memes typically used goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu “doge” — pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.
The picture also later became an NFT digital artwork that sold for $4 million and inspired Dogecoin, which was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $23 billion.
