On Friday, Kabosu, a Shiba Inu who helped popularize the “doge” meme and whose face is emblazoned upon the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, died on Friday. She was 18 years old.
In 2022, she was diagnosed with leukemia and had liver issues, according to the New York Times.
The dog’s owner, Atsuko Sato, a kindergarten teacher who lives in Sakura, a city east of Tokyo, announced Kabosu had “crossed the rainbow bridge” on social media Friday, per the Times. Sato also honored the popular pup in a poem on her blog on Friday.
“She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her,” Sato wrote, according to a translation by the AFP news agency. “I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner.”
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Kabosu rose from everyday dog to Air Bud-level fame in the early 2010s, when a photo of her with crossed legs and a side-eye expression became known as the “doge” meme on Tumblr. The meme typically consisted of Kabosu’s face surrounded by rainbow-colored text in the Comic Sans font, and usually included words like “wow” or “amaze” and phrases written in broken English, such as “give attention” or “what F you doing,” meant to stand in for the dog’s internal monologue.
The meme’s usage eventually evolved, and social media users would use Kabosu to comment on world events, pop culture news and politics.
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Kabosu’s face also became the logo for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency coin introduced in 2013, per the Times. Although the coin was initially created as a joke, people actually made a good chunk of money off it in 2021 after it experienced a huge spike in value. A non-fungible token, or NFT, of the image was also sold in 2021 for $4 million, per NBC News.
Sato adopted Kabosu from an animal shelter in November, 2008, saving her life.
“She was a pedigreed dog from a puppy mill, and when the puppy mill closed down, she was abandoned along with 19 other Shiba dogs,” Sato told the Verge in 2013. “Some of them were adopted, but the rest of them were killed.”
Kabosu was named by a volunteer at the shelter after a type of Japanese citrus.
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“Her face is very round just like kabosu [fruit],” Sato told the Verge. “I thought the name was perfect, so I kept it.”
Because of Kabosu’s rough start in life, Sato told the outlet that she wanted “to shower her with love as a member of my family.” Discovering that the Shiba Inu had a “very gentle and calm” temperament, Sato decided to shoot a few photos of Kabosu in 2010 — including the fateful doge meme photo — and posted them to her personal blog.
Sato told the Verge she was pretty shocked when she began seeing her dog’s face popping up all over the internet.
“I was taken aback,” Sato said. “It felt very strange to see her face there. It was a Kabosu that I didn’t know.”
She added that despite the internet fame, she and her dog lived a pretty normal life together.
“Around me, nobody knows about the doge meme,” Sato told the Verge. “Maybe I don’t understand memes very well, because I’m living such an analog life.”
