Japanese man pays nearly R250,000 for life-sized dog costume to fulfill dream of transforming into animal

A man in Japan forked out $15,700 (R245,893) to transform himself into a dog. He enlisted the help of a company that makes costumes for TV to create a border collie fur suit. The man now creates YouTube videos wearing the fur suit and frolicking around on all fours. For more stories visit Business Insider.

A Japanese man has spent more than R200,000 to fulfill his dream of transforming into a four-legged animal.

The man, currently known only by his Twitter username Toco, spent two million Japanese yen to create a lifelike border collie costume that he could inhabit.A video shared by the man on Twitter last month has since been viewed over 1.7 million times. The footage shows the man rolling around on the ground in his border collie suit and gesturing at the camera with his "paw."

Toco also has a YouTube channel through which he documents snippets of his life in the fur costume. In the channel's description, he wrote: "I wanted to be an animal, so I became a collie!" 

The company behind the furry outfit, Zeppet, posted the details of the costume on its website. Zeppet is known for creating models and movie sculptures, primarily for television and film. 

"At the request of a customer, we made a model of a dog suit. Modeled after a collie, it reproduces the realistic appearance of a real, quadrupedal dog," the company wrote. 

Zeppet's Twitter account also documented what the final dog suit looked like from multiple angles.

According to the company, the suit took 40 days to produce. 

In an interview with Japanese media outlet MyNavi, Toco said he chose a border collie costume because the dog's long fur would obscure the human-like aspects of his figure. 

"I made it a collie because it looks real when I put it on. My favorite animals are quadrupedal ones, especially cute ones," Toco said. "So I made a suit of the collie, my favorite breed of dog."

A representative for Zeppet told MyNavi that the structure of a dog's skeleton differed significantly from that of a human being, which made it time-consuming for the company's designers to figure out how to make the costume as doglike as possible. 

"We collect photographs taken from various angles so that the beautiful coat of a collie can be reproduced, and devise ways to let the coat of fur flow naturally," said the Zeppet spokesperson. 

Toco did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.

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