Grey-A-Day #16
Guinefort is the only canine to ever be sainted, even if he was done so by the public instead of the Church. Guinefort, a greyhound, belonged to a French knight near Lyon. The story goes that the knight walked into his son’s nursery one evening and couldn’t find the infant - however, he did find Guinefort with blood smeared all over his face and believed that the greyhound had mistaken his son for a snack. In anger he drew his sword and killed the dog. Then his son started crying; he found him under an overturned cot with a dead snake. Guinefort had saved the baby from certain death and was rewarded with his own demise. The knight and his family immediately erected a shrine on his grave (in a well) to the misunderstood dog and soon after “miracles” started happening at the shrine, locals declared Guinefort the patron saint for the protection of infants. The Catholic Church hated this and spent hundreds of years trying to get people to stop calling the dog “Saint.” The trend persisted until the 1930s and then seemed to die out; however his Feast day is still remembered on August 22nd.