Dogs outnumber children in San Francisco and Chicago

Google’s dog-friendly policies extend to all of its 70 offices, in countries including Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Russia, and Brazil.

MODERN TIMES

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Marking Their Territory

Thanks to the tech crowd, San Francisco is now home to more dogs than children—and the city is forever changed

BY JASON SHEELER

READING TIME: 6 MINUTES

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Winnie Kenney, who moved to San Francisco from Nashville earlier this year, works at Google’s campus in downtown San Francisco. That’s nice for two reasons: she doesn’t have to commute 90 minutes each way to Mountain View on a Taylor-Swift-tour-size bus, and the Embarcadero is just across the street, offering sublime views and a two-acre park.

After lunch, Googlers like Winnie escape from the glass-enclosed conference rooms and are reminded of why they live here. They hit the salty 70-degree air clad in what’s known as Pata-Gucci: puffy base layers, stretchy cargoes, and shoes made from recycled plastic bottles, toting pinging phones, rainbow-striped Google badges, and low-key optimism. Winnie has the badge and a super-positive outlook, but not a phone, because she doesn’t have thumbs. She’s a dog, in fact. More precisely, she’s a Doogler.

Dogs at Work: A Love Story

Twenty years ago, a Leonberger named Yoshka was Google’s first Doogler. The champion show dog, who died in 2012, belonged to Urs Hölzle, Google’s eighth employee and senior vice-president for technical engineering. Yoshka was the subject of a blog and kept an office on the third floor. Today, a popular café on Google’s Mountain View campus is named after him, and he’s remembered as a true stud. (In fact, his lineage lives on.) He paved the way for a tech culture that is less dog-friendly and more dogs-nearly-everywhere.