The best financial advice of the year may have come from a golden retriever in Guangdong, China, who could not be reached for comment because he is a dog.
As UPI reported, a woman identified by her surname Lin was out shopping when her golden retriever pulled free of its leash and bolted into a nearby lottery shop. By the time she caught up to him, the damage was done: the dog had clamped his teeth around a scratch-off ticket and left tooth marks all over it. It was now damaged merchandise, so Lin had to pay for it.
A financial genius
This is the part of the story where the dog turns out to be a genius. The ticket her retriever had personally selected by mouth was a winner. It paid 1,000 yuan, about $139.
“I was so surprised. I’ve never won such a large sum of money in a lottery,” Lin told AsiaOne. It’s a sentence that becomes funnier the longer you sit with the fact that her financial advisor is a golden retriever.
Naturally, she pressed her luck. Lin brought the dog back to the shop the next day to see if the magic held, and let him pick again. This time the ticket paid 30 yuan, a little over four dollars. Diminished returns, but still technically undefeated. A reasonable person reads that as a clear sign to stop while the dog is ahead, and Lin did exactly that. She took her winnings and spent them on canned food and treats for the actual genius behind the operation.
Easy come, easy go
The story made the rounds on the Chinese social platform Weibo, where commenters crowned the retriever a “fortune dog.” As PEOPLE noted, one user summed up the only logical takeaway: “I don’t know if I should buy a lottery ticket or a golden retriever.” Another reportedly suggested the real money was in cutting out the middleman and simply acquiring the dog.
When you zoom out, it is a very small story. A dog ate a lottery ticket and won pocket change, and the pocket change went back into dog food, which means the entire economy of this incident begins and ends with the retriever’s stomach. But that’s also what makes it perfect. No one’s life changed. A good boy did a chaotic thing, it happened to work out, and he got snacks. We should all be so lucky as to fail upward that gracefully.
