Dogshaming

About

Dogshaming is a single topic blog featuring photographs of dogs with signs describing transgressions performed by the animal.

Origin

The “Dogshaming” Tumblr^[1] blog was launched on August 16th, 2012, with a post featuring a photograph of a black and tan dachsund with a sign that read, “I am an underwear eating jerk!” (shown below). Within six days, the post received more than 940 notes.

Spread

On August 21st, 2012, a Dogshaming Twitter account^[9] and subreddit^[11] were created. The same day, the Internet news site The Daily Dot^[2] published an article titled ""Tumblr’s Dogshaming Documents Dogs Behaving Badly", which featured two notable examples from the blog (shown below).

The same day, the MSN blog Digital Life^[3] reblogged The Daily Dot in a post titled “Pups ‘confess’ their bad behavior on new Dogshaming blog.” The first parody site, ShameYourPet.com^[7] also launched that day, allowing owners to shame any kind of pet, not just their dogs. On August 22nd, a Facebook account^[10] for the site was created, gaining more than more than 135,000 fans as of March 2013. The same day, the Dogshaming Tumblr was featured during a segment on The Today Show:

Also on the 22nd, The Huffington Post^[4] published an article titled “Dogshaming Tumblr Goes Viral As Owners Pan Naughty Pooches”, which included a quote from Tumblr editorial director Chris Mahoney, who claimed he came up with the idea for the photograph series.

“It was a half-baked joke that I didn’t think would amount to much beyond a few hours’ amusement,” he told The Huffington Post via email on Wednesday. “It came from one reblogged post on my dash that had four doghsaming pics from various sources, so I reblogged the original one and posted all four (with sources) as individual posts.”

The same day, Australian news site Nine MSN^[6] published an article titled “Dog Owners Publicly Shame Their Naughty Pets”, which speculated that the blog was inspired by parents making their children wear signs in public admitting their transgressions. The Daily Dot^[5] published a followup article the same day, which revealed that Mohney had passed control of the Dogshaming Tumblr over to the creator of the original dogshaming photograph. On August 23rd, Dog-Shame.com^[8] launched, attemping to piggyback off of the success of the original blog. Throughout 2012, the blog and similar acts of pet shaming were highlighted on a number of news and internet culture sites including Mashable^[12], The Daily Mail^[13], Uproxx^[14], Buzzfeed^[15], the Chive^[16], Jest^[17], Laughing Squid^[18] and Oddee.^[19] In December 2012, actor Wil Wheaton^[20] posted his own dogshaming photo (shown below), shaming his dog for eating its pet dish.