National Purebred Dog Day has long lamented how hard it is to find real information about dog actors. The films survive, and biographies of the human stars fill shelves. But the dogs who carry whole scenes and worm their way into our hearts are usually an afterthought: left out of the credits, missing from the record, remembered by the name of the character rather than their own. Even Terry, the Cairn Terrier who played Toto in The Wizard of Oz, is hard to pin down. One source credits her with more than 16 films, another with 17, and her year of death appears as both 1944 and 1945.

So we were pleased to read that Terry has been taken seriously in an unlikely place: a library-standards document.

In April 2016, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s Standing Committee on Standards reviewed a proposed model that librarians use to describe who creates and contributes to works. The draft implicitly limited creative agency to human beings. The committee objected, called that restriction “unhelpful,” and offered Terry as proof: “It was not Terry’s trainer, Carl Spitz, who appeared in the film as Toto; it was Terry.”

Darn right!

That important sentence keeps apart three things the public tends to blur. Terry was the real performer. Toto was the character. Carl Spitz was the trainer who took Terry in after her original family abandoned her. His system of silent hand signals gave his dogs an edge once films had sound. On The Wizard of Oz, Terry earned $125 a week, more than many of the human actors. After her death, she was buried on the Spitz ranch, but the grave was bulldozed when the Ventura Freeway went through. A memorial was dedicated at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2011.

The committee’s review was a recommendation, not a ruling, and whether the final cataloging model adopted its objection isn’t something we’ve been able to confirm. Still, people writing the rules for how knowledge is organized stopped to say that the dog did the work.

Dog actors rarely get that kind of credit, and we think it’s time they do.

Photo of Buck, Toto, Prince, Mr. Binkie and Musty posing with their trainer Carl Spitz (circa 1939)/Part of the Bison Archive photographs collected by Marc Wanamaker in the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Photo from Wikicommons is in the public domain