Like its Italian cousin, however, Suzhou’s scenic water works are blighted by pollution. The most visible sort of flotsam consists of tossed plastic bottles which float downstream in plain sight. It’s gotten to the point where people simply tune out the presence of floating garbage since they’re helpless, individually at least, to do anything about it. That’s simply not good enough for our furry toxic avenger!
The dog’s owner states he’s trained his “green” Golden Retriever to, er, retrieve any bottles either of them can spy as they conduct their daily riverside walk near the Surging Waves Pavilion (Cang Lang Ting), one of Suzhou’s oldest urban gardens. He estimates the dog will remove from 20 to 30 bottles from the river, weather permitting.
The age of the dog is undetermined but he and his owner have been fixtures of Cang Lang Ting for about 10 years. That’s not very long compared to the history of the water garden, which originated over 1,000 years ago as a private villa during China’s Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Of course, pollution in the form of plastic bottles is an exclusively modern blight – so much for the march of “progress”. (via People’s Daily Online, CZTV, Quda100, and PetsLady) 

