Dogshaming

About

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

Origin

The “Dogshaming” Tumblr^[1] blog was launched on August 16th, 2012, with its first 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 over 940 notes.

Spread

On August 21st, 2012, the Internet news blog 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.” On August 22nd, the Dogshaming Tumblr was featured during a segment on The Today Show:

The same day, 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 claiming 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.”

Also on August 22nd, Nine MSN^[6] news 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.