Dogs are treasures. They are happy little beasties that improve our lives in almost every way, but they can also be enraging little menaces intent on making our days as difficult as possible.
It’s all worth it in the end, for the love of a canine companion, but that doesn’t make their antics any less irritating when our pups are mid-madness. Nothing illustrates this quite so well as a TikTok of the charming but chaotic Dumpling, a Doodle with mischief on the mind.
A video perfectly illustrates the mayhem Dumpling brings into her poor owner’s life on a daily basis, after the curly canine interrupted a walk and likely altered the plans of her human companion for the entire evening.
Most dogs love a good puddle, but it seems no dog loves a puddle quite so much as Dumpling. Upon seeing a nice juicy puddle — verging on a mini pond — the Doodle deviated from her walk to take a dip (or five) into absolutely filthy water.
By the time the video begins, Dumpling is already soaked and so covered in mud she’s unrecognizable. Absolutely caked in filth, the dog couldn’t be having a better time, but you can hear the despair creeping into our videographer’s voice more with every fresh dip into that dirty water.
Despite the fact that she manages to blind herself with caked-on mud, Dumpling even goes back for seconds, happily hopping, flipping, and rolling her way through the filthy puddle. She’s completely unrecognizable by the end of the video, looking a bit more like a brown Old Greg than a poodle mix.
Viewers were deeply charmed by the video, past concerns over just which car was set to be ruined on the way home, and flooded the video’s comment section with jokes. “Dumpling is in her dipping sauce,” one commenter quipped. “Dumpling should now be called gravy,” another accurately pointed out.
Others noted that clearly the reason Dumpling seems to have such a problem hearing her owner as he begs her to abandon the puddle is simply due to the mud in her ears. That’s not her fault now, is it?
Dumpling is just engaging in classic dog behavior with her venture into the mud. There are a few culprits behind the canine obsession with silty splash zones, but the most prominent of these is camouflage. It’s baked into our dogs’ genes to seek to hide their scent, something that stretches back to their lupine days, and puddles provide the perfect opportunity. They also provide cooling on hot days, and — let’s face it — they’re also a delightfully fun way to disobey the human ‘rents.
In Dumpling’s case, the camouflage aspect certainly worked out — as did the fun. She’s barely recognizable by the end of the video, causing quite a few commenters to request a pre-mud image of Dumpling for reference. In her usual, non-mudded state, the pup is a lovely pale gold color, but there’s not an inch of gold left on her by the time Dumpling is finished with her plunge into the mud.