Champ, a German shepherd who helped restore the time-honored presidential custom of getting a pet on the White Home, died on Saturday.
Champ was 13, and “died peacefully at residence,” President Biden and Jill Biden, the primary girl, said on Twitter.
“In our most joyful moments and in our most grief-stricken days, he was there with us, delicate to our each unstated feeling and emotion,” they mentioned. “We love our candy, good boy and can miss him all the time.”
The Biden household’s different German shepherd, Main, started roaming the White Home in January, after a four-year hiatus of pets within the government residence in the course of the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Main was lately despatched for coaching after a sequence of biting episodes.
Mr. Trump was the primary president in additional than a century to not have a pet of any sort, Andrew Hager, the historian-in-residence on the Presidential Pet Museum, mentioned.
The Biden household acquired Champ in 2008 from a breeder after Mr. Biden was elected vp, in line with Politico. The Bidens named the pet Champ in a tribute to Mr. Biden’s father, who would inform his son, “Stand up, champ,” when life was difficult.
Champ was a delicate canine who as a pet chased golf balls on the entrance garden of the Naval Observatory and cherished operating after the Bidens’ grandchildren, the Bidens mentioned.
As he grew older, he would curl up on the Bidens’ ft in entrance of a hearth.
“At the same time as Champ’s power waned in his final days, once we got here right into a room, he would instantly pull himself up, his tail all the time wagging,” the Bidens mentioned. “Every thing was immediately higher when he was subsequent to us.”