Ah, cute animal videos — whatever your mood you can always rely on videos of dogs, cats, and even pigs to provide you with that oh-so-sweet serotonin boost.
The best place for such content in this day and age is TikTok of course — with seemingly no end to the assortment of cute animal vids that are guaranteed to brighten your day. One trend we’ve seen plenty of over the years is the one where you call your dog’s name when they’re sitting right next to you. It’s a harmless little prank but something about seeing the confusion it causes is so wholesome and funny at the same time.
It’s the kind of timeless content that will always be a surefire hit every time, if you have a dog you could easily go viral by recording yourself calling their name when they’re right next to you.The trend has taken off on TikTok as trends often do, with thousands of videos of people confusing the hell out of their pets. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s kind of a form of gaslighting — okay —that actually does sound a little cruel when you put it like that but it’s all done in jest I promise.
It might be funny to us, but our dogs definitely do not find it amusing. One dog by the name of Snoopy definitely didn’t see the funny side when his owner tried the viral trend on him.
If you ever wondered what a Dachshund having an existential crisis would look like, this is it. That face of utter astoundment, the failure to comprehend; this poor pooch is petrified. Snoopy’s face almost looks as if he’s expecting himself to show up, like this is a dog version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something. Or maybe he was just worried his owner was going senile. This isn’t the only time the poor pup has had this trick played on him.
Poor Snoopy’s entire world view seems to be crashing down around him — it sort of reminds me of the Bunny the dog videos from a few years back — for those who don’t know or have forgotten, Bunny was a dog who learned to communicate using buttons with pre-recorded words, she learned around 100 words but with that intelligences came the realization that she was a dog, but what does it even mean to be a dog? What does anything even mean? Hopefully Bunny found the answers.
The psychology and intelligence of dogs is still a relatively unknown field. While it’s not clear whether a dog can actually have an existential crisis, research indicates that they are at least self-aware. According to Whole Dog Journal, dogs have self-awareness although not to the same level as humans. In reality we have no clue what was going through Snoopy’s head in that moment, perhaps he thought he had turned invisible.