Paddy the Wanderer
Paddy the Wanderer was an Airedale Terrier who roamed the streets of Wellington, New Zealand, during the Great Depression. He was a friend of cabbies, workers, and seamen alike, who took turns at paying his dog licence every year. Paddy was known for greeting sailors in the port at Wellington and accompanying them, as a stowaway, on their coastal steamers. Paddy the Wanderer, according to a telephone call made to The Evening Post a day after his death, had been given to the daughter of Mrs. R. Gardner of Wellington by a horse trainer from Christchurch. After the child died, eleven years earlier, the dog ran away. According to Dianne Haworth's 2007 biography, the child had died of pneumonia; after her death, Paddy wandered the Wellington waterfront and occasionally took trips on visiting ships. He had crossed the Tasman Sea many times, and had flown in a Gypsy Moth. He was rumoured to have made it to San Francisco and back. Wellington Harbour Board adopted Paddy under the formal title of Assistant Night Watchman, whose job it was to keep guard for "pirates, smugglers and rodents". Haworth also reports that apparently Paddy had almost fallen victim to a dognapping scheme