Kurt Koffka, considered to be one of the founding fathers of Gestalt Psychology, once said: “That is the nice thing about a purebred dog – if you find one you like, they are so much the same that you can have him again and again and they never really die.”
We interpret this as Koffka’s preference for predictability, but to be fair, we should put his statement in context. Koffka always had Smooth Dachshunds as his dog. In his lifetime, he’s believed to have had seven, and each of them was named “Max.” When asked why, he replied that his first dog was “Max,” and when he died, the new Dachshie looked like Max and acted like Max and sometimes Koffka called him Max. He said to himself that if the dog wanted to be Max, he was Max. “I suppose that I wanted Max to live with me forever,” Koffka said. “That is the nice thing about a purebred dog…..” and you know the rest.

Image: “Dash the Daxie” made of recycled plastic toys on a wooden armature by Robert Bradford