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Dog shaming

You might remember it as dogshaming, pet shaming

The archive does not hold a copy of this image that it may show.

2012·The social era·funny

A Tumblr blog that invented a format every pet owner on earth then used.

At a glanceThe facts

Remembered as
dogshaming
Spread in
2012
Began as
A web page
Where it started
tumblr
Format
Meme
Era
The social era
Origin
Not an upload originally
Available
Not held by ViralWorld

What this wasThe story

A dog sits beside a hand-lettered sign confessing what it has done. I ate the sofa. I bark at the wind. I am afraid of the cat. The dog looks either guilty or entirely untroubled, and the gap between the crime and the expression is the joke. Pascale Lemire started the blog in August 2012.

It is one of the small number of formats invented on Tumblr that escaped completely into general use — a template so simple that it needs no explanation and can be reproduced by anybody with a marker pen. It also started a genuine argument, conducted on daytime television within weeks, about whether dogs experience guilt at all or whether the whole thing is people reading their own face onto an animal.

The blog became a book and a franchise, and the format spread to cats, children, houseplants and coworkers. It remains one of the durable structural inventions of the Tumblr era, mostly used by people who have never heard of the blog.

Why it is here: copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later

This began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on Tumblr.

Where it came fromWhat we know

There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on Tumblr.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

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