Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA – In Cape Town’s Museum of Dogs, an empty leather collar rests alone on a white pedestal. Light brown and tagless, it stands in for a dog who slipped out of a garden one day and never came home.
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The story beside it, titled “Where are you?” is written by an anonymous contributor from Cape Town. They describe searching, imagining they might spot her in crowded dog parks, and living with the unresolved question of what happened until the day they calculated she could not be alive anymore.
It ends simply: “I hope her final years were filled with love.”
That combination – a small, ordinary object and a carefully chosen fragment of someone’s life – is the core of the Museum of Dog’s most effective exhibit, titled “Every Dog Has Its Day.”
Housed on the museum’s second floor, it is a bright, open space with wide windows, white rectangular pedestals and a few tables and pixelated dog sculptures scattered through the room. Intended to give dozens of dogs “their day” by highlighting unusual or impactful stories from their lives, the rectangular pedestals are arranged in neat rows with room to walk between them and read each story.
Part memorial and part show-and-tell, every platform holds one object and one story about a real dog and a real human relationship.
The objects themselves are items chosen from the course of everyday life or special events: a novel, a stuffed animal, a handbag, a leash, a favorite blanket, a full-size rolling office chair, even a wedding dress. On their own, they could belong in any home.
But the Museum of Dogs curates them by pairing each with a narrative explaining how that item connects to one person’s experience of living alongside their dog. And since they were arranged in a seemingly random order throughout the available pedestals in the room, it is possible to find a sad story like “Where are you?” next to hilarious or slightly unbelievable stories about times dogs skipped their training exams or helped their owners buy their dream home.
Still, several of the most memorable stories deal with loss. Alongside the empty collar, another pedestal holds a blanket donated by Johannah Bernstein from Geneva, Switzerland.
Her accompanying story recounts the night her dog Brit died, but it does so by tracing the life that came before: ski touring, high mountain hiking, swimming, wilderness camping, and lots of mud. Their relationship is mapped through shared activities.
So, alongside the blanket and a framed picture of Brit, museum visitors carry on the memory of her life and learn about the adventures of a dog who literally broadened the world her person inhabited.
Taken together, these stories show the grief of losing a dog as substantial, not a minor or embarrassing kind of sadness.
“Every Dog Has Its Day” highlights how animals can be central figures in a life story, and ways their absence can leave a real and lingering gap – for visitors who have experienced loss first-hand, these stories will likely resonate.
In interesting contrast, other stories are delightfully hilarious, specifically capturing the kind of behavior every dog owner recognizes.
One pedestal features an office chair with a distinctively worn strip of cushion. The accompanying story explained that the contributor’s dog, as a puppy, liked to curl up wedged behind her back. As the dog grew, she refused to give up the spot, eventually pushing her human forward until only a narrow sliver of seat remained for the person.
Another story is represented by a toaster. Its contributor, Paul King from Gqeberha, South Africa, recounted how his dog would wait under a birdfeeder to catch falling pieces of toast, then defend her find for the rest of the day. Next to a tea tin is the story of a dog who developed a taste for Rooibos.
These pieces capture how dogs weave themselves, effortlessly, into daily rituals like meals, morning routines, and habits, until humans cannot imagine any life other than those intertwined with our animal companions.
An adjacent platform tells the story of K9 search and rescue dogs, who played a key role in rescuing survivors when a construction apartment building collapsed in George, South Africa in May 2024.
Dogs, though recipients of care or sources of emotional support, are also collaborators whose abilities humans rely on in critical moments.
What unifies all of these stories – heartbreaking, funny, and heroic – is that they insist on specificity.
The Museum of Dogs doesn’t talk about “dogs” in the abstract. Instead, it offers a concentrated curation of over 20 concrete stories of relationships and asks visitors to notice how much of each human life has been shaped by dogs. Where do they go? How do they spend their time? How do they respond to danger and loss? What do we continue to miss about them years later?
The Museum of Dogs describes its purpose as celebrating the myriad ways dogs impact our lives. It succeeds most when it focuses on these concrete, personal stories upstairs. There, dogs are sources of comfort, chaos, partnership, and change.
The rest of the museum supplements this core.
Downstairs, exhibits trace the history of dogs in South Africa, showcasing their roles as working animals, status symbols, guardians, and companions. Other sections look at dogs in culture, including music and visual art, and framed profiles of U.S. presidents’ dogs line the staircase.
A guest book near the exit allows visitors to write a story about their own dogs, and it reads as a continuation of the “Every Dog Has Its Day” exhibit. The museum encourages people to submit stories for possible inclusion in future iterations.
The building itself is tucked away at the end of a quiet street in Cape Town at 95 Keerom. Constructed around 1683, it is one of the oldest in the city. In contrast, Museum of Dogs is one of Cape Town’s youngest museums; opened in July 2024, engaged visitors may have the opportunity to shape its future.
For visitors of any age – whether already devoted to dogs or just curious about how humans and animals coexist – the Museum of Dogs offers an engaging, worthwhile stop.
The museum is nominally about dogs, but its real subject is the relationship between dogs and people, and the stories we tell about the course of our lives. Across every sphere of human life, we find dogs.
Annamika Konkola is a Correspondent with Youth Journalism International.
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