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There’s no shortage of cat pictures on the internet, but there’s no shortage of dog pictures either. Recently, the internet, almost collectively, progressed into getting as many pets as possible, and with social media flooded with adorable pictures of snakes, and hamsters, and fishes, and dogs, and cats, it’s inevitable that people will make memes about them too. After all, memes have become the common language everyone shares.
So now, the best way to communicate is absolutely through memes, which is why we’ve gathered the best kind of doggo memes for your bemusement and luxury. Kick back, relax, and tell your dog, even if it’s an imaginary one, to behave while you scroll through them. Because they’re so common and all over the place, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where they originated, or when. Memes like these just… Spontaneously came into existence. Don’t question it.
Washington Post outlines why we love dogs so much.
There is evidence that interacting with pets does reduce people’s stress, provided the pet is behaving properly. Good interactions do have quite a profound effect, causing changes in oxytocin and in beta endorphins. Those are actual changes going on in the body of somebody who is stroking a friendly dog. So that’s the upside. The downside is that pets, real pets that actually live with people, cause stress and expense and all sorts of other things that can cause arguments within the family. And if you take humanity as a whole, I suspect that those two things kind of balance out. For every paper that says that pets make you live longer or that they make people healthier, many other reports — particularly those that come from medical professionals, who don’t really have a stake in the field — that find no effect or actually negative effects. The reporting bias is in favor of the good ones, so the study that showed that cat owners were usually more depressed than people who don’t have any pets didn’t rate any headlines. So pet-keeping as a habit, averaged out, is probably not having any major effect on health in either direction. If the dog gets people out and about and likes energetic exercise, then there are probably health benefits. But they’re not just going to come as part of the package.
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I think it’s about a puzzling and unusually unique effect pets give to people, which is what I call the trustworthiness effect, which hasn’t received a huge amount of attention in the press, but it has been replicated in studies in several different countries. People with animals, or as simply described as having a friendly dog with them, instantly become more trustworthy in the eyes of the person who’s encountering that person or having that person described to them. I think it actually explains quite a lot — people are believed when they tell nice stories about animals. Whether that applies to news reports as well, I’m just guessing, but I think it’s a reasonable explanation. I think it also explains a lot of the effects of animal-assisted therapy. The magic is actually in making the person with the animal much more approachable. In a senior residence, it’s not simply the seniors who find the visitor a good person to talk to, but the staff finds the visits beneficial as well. It makes the whole place seem a bit more homely. The dog, or whatever animal, is changing people’s perception of the person doing the therapy. This is the trustworthiness factor, and it explains quite a lot of our biases.
I’ve spent a lot of my career pursuing the idea of better welfare for household pets, and I can see some potential risks. The one that we’re seeing most is people bypassing the idea that you have to know about these animals. Fifty or 100 years ago, the knowledge of how to look after animals was passed from person to person. Now we are much more insular. And the idea that simply getting a pet is going to make you happy and de-stress you is not going to work if you don’t do the homework about what the animal needs. One trend which I have particular concern about is for flat-faced dogs. People don’t really understand that having a dog that looks very cute is also likely to have breathing difficulties, eye problems and other health issues. I find that quite distressing. We have a lot of knowledge now about how dogs think and how they feel, and yet that knowledge is still not getting through to a particular kind of owner who is just obeying the fashion and their gut instincts. They’re told that this is going to be a really good experience for them, and maybe it is, but it probably won’t be that great an experience for the dog.
If we assume that affluence continues to spread, which is debatable, I would see many other cultures becoming more keen to have pets. I did some studies 15 or 20 years ago looking at the emergence of the Americanization of pet-keeping in Japan, where increasingly younger people are bringing dogs into the house and treating them more like members of the family. I think that will spread to other cultures. Longer term, there will need to be a rethink because of world resources. Both dogs and cats are carnivores — the cat is a very strict carnivore. The idea that we can continue to essentially farm the world in a way that provides enough meat for dogs and cats to eat, let alone humans, is probably not sustainable. Whether it will be possible for people to continue to keep these animals, or what kinds of substitutes they find if it does become impossible, I think is going to be fascinating, if somewhat painful for the people involved.
What did you think about these poor pupperinos? Tell us down in the comments!
