Don’t Spend Your Emotional Energy on Sully H.W. Bush

Sully H.W. Bush is a service dog who had been with the president for six months, not his lifelong companion.

On Sunday night, George H.W. Bush spokesman Jim McGrath posted a photograph to Twitter depicting a golden Labrador named Sully resting in front of the former president’s casket. The caption read “Mission complete.”

Within hours, Sully the dog had become a bona fide celebrity. McGrath’s sentiment has been retweeted 61,000 times and counting, and “Sully” was trending on Twitter at various times on Monday.

But Sully is not a longtime Bush family pet, letting go of the only master he has known. He is an employee who served for less than six months. But Monday morning, just a few days after his owner died, Bush’s son George W. Bush announced that Sully is heading to his next assignment: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.

The photograph, in other words, is not proof that Sully is a particularly “good boy” or that “we don’t deserve dogs,” as countless swooning tweets put it on Monday. On its own, it says almost nothing other than the fact that Sully was, at one point in the same room as the casket of his former boss. This is simply a photograph of a dog doing something dogs love to do: Lie down. The frenzy around it captures something humans love to do, too: Project our own emotional needs onto animals.

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