Seattle dog rides city bus, report says
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Ask any city-dweller: ride the bus long enough and you'll see everything.
In Seattle, that now includes a dog for a fellow passenger.
KomoNews.com reports that commuters in the city's Belltown neighborhood have been joined in recent weeks by Eclipse, a black Labrador retriever who boards the bus by herself.
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Where's she going? To the local dog park to hang out with her friends, of course.
The trips began when her owner, Jeff Young, took too long to finish a cigarette while waiting at a bus stop. Trained to heel but apparently not to wait, the dog hopped on the D Line bus, and she's since made several trips by herself.
"She's been here the last two years, so she's been urbanized, totally. She's a bus-riding, sidewalk-walking dog," Young told KomoNews.com. "Probably once a week I get a phone call. 'Hi. I have your dog Eclipse here on 3rd and Bell,'" he said. "I have to tell them, 'no. She's fine.' She knows what she's doing."
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As the bus's only canine passenger, Eclipse, who roams the aisles and hops onto seats next to strangers, generates a lot of attention from the human bus riders.
"All the bus drivers know her. She sits here just like a person does," commuter Tiona Rainwater told the outlet on a downtown trip on Monday. "She makes everybody happy. How could you not love this thing?"
Jeff Switzer, a spokesman for Metro Transit, told FoxNews.com that he wasn't aware of any complaints stemming from Eclipse's rides, though he said the transit authority does urge owners to leash their dogs.
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He does joke, however: "We think Eclipse would be much safer in the world if she kept her owner on a leash."
All well and good. But does she know to pay exact fare when she boards the bus?
"I don't know if she can read the fare policy," Switzer said.
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FoxNews.com's Karl de Vries contributed to this report.