Juan Monroy

Ben Yakas at Gothamist wrote an amusing story suggesting that the MTA, the parent agency of the New York City Subway, adopt a mascot to improve relations between the agency and its straphanging public. Each of the twelve candidate mascots is illustrated by Matt Lubchansky.

Almost immediately, I was drawn to the dog in the blue IKEA bag, referred to with the tongue-twisting moniker “DAGBOG,” an obvious anagram of “Bag Dog.”

MTA rules dictate that any animal—including any dog—”must be enclosed in a container and carried in a manner which would not annoy other passengers.” Anyone who has lived in New York for a time has seen at least one instance of a person carrying a dog into a subway stations and onto trains by toting them in a blue IKEA bag.

I tried this once with Beagle Sam. It didn’t go well.

Last March, I was sitting Beagle Sam for the weekend, and we were headed to a party that was a thirty-minute walk away. Because it is still cold in March, I thought I would take Sam onto the subway to cut down our travel time—and outdoor exposure—to less than 10 minutes.

I put Sam in a blue IKEA bag, but once we boarded the train, Sam began to pant and tremble. She was clearly nervous about the movement of the train. This concerned me so much that we got off the train at the next station and walked the rest of the way to the party.

Alas, Sam was not cutout to be a “Bag Dog,” but perhaps she can at least model for the DAGBOG mascot.