Owney (dog)

A scruffy terrier mix who slept on mail bags at the Albany, New York, post office from about 1888 and then rode Railway Mail Service cars across the country. Clerks tagged his collar so he could be sent home, other post offices added their own tags, and the National Postal Museum still holds 372 of them. His 1895 round-the-world trip, leaving Tacoma in August and reaching New York on 23 December, is well reported; tales of medals from the Emperor of Japan are shakier. He was shot in Toledo in June 1897 after allegedly biting a clerk, and his preserved body is now at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington.