Bumped head while jumping turnstile. (Image courtesy of David Shankbone.)

Arts & Letters Daily pointed me in the direction of this excellent Financial Times article by Susanne Sternthal about the 35,000 stray dogs that live in Moscow, several hundred of which reside in the subway. Metro dogs are such a common occurrence that there is a website dedicated to cellphone photographs of such canines. What’s more fascinating is that some of these dogs have learned how to use the subway to get from point A to point B the way human riders do. An excerpt from the article:

“‘The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,’ says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology. ‘This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,’ he says. ‘When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.’ The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. ‘Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?’ he asks.

‘They orient themselves in a number of ways,’ Neuronov adds. ‘They figure out where they are by smell, by recognizing the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their biological clocks.’”