Reading Cassius Dio again and this anecdote about a horse who loved his owner might end me

I love animal stories in Roman sources. My favourite one at the moment comes from Pliny the Elder (a treasure trove of good stories) and is about a famous raven who got a public funeral.

Pliny claims that, in the reign of Tiberius, some ravens set themselves up in the Temple of Castor and someone adopted one of the baby ravens and taught it to speak.

Specifically they taught it to fly to the Rostra in the forum (the speaker's platform) every morning and salute by name the emperor and his two sons, Germanicus and Tiberius. It would then hang out there and say hi to the people going to work.

It was, obviously, massively popular. Who would not love a raven that said hi to you on your commute?

The one person who did not love it was a rival of the person who had reared it. The person who taught the raven to speak was a shoemaker in the 8th district of Rome, and the raven would fly home there every day where it presumably brought in trade.

Rival shoemakers hated the bird. So one day, a rival shoemaker claimed that the raven had come into his shop and (deliberately??) shat on his shoes. So he killed it.

The raven that hailed the emperor every morning and said hi to everyone in the forum was MURDERED!

People were so furious about this murder of an innocent bird that they drove the rival shoemaker out of the district and had him put to death. They executed him!

And for the raven, they held a big public funeral. The little body of the bird was placed on a litter which was carried by "two Ethiopians"

The litter was carried through Rome, preceded by a piper and followed by a crowd lamenting and carrying "garlands of every size and description."

The crowd marched out of Rome and up the Appian Way, all the way to the second mile-marker out of the city, where the bird received many speeches about how loved it was, and then was laid to rest with much weeping.

Pliny ends his story shaking his head with wonder that this raven attracted a bigger crowd of mourners than many distinguished men. And giving a date of the funeral: 28th March 33CE

Here's Pliny's account, along with a bunch of other famous birds http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D10%3Achapter%3D60