The Shameful Story of Dog Shaming

When working at Tumblr, I created a joke tumblr about dogshaming—a nascent (at the time) meme format where people would take pictures of their dogs right after those dogs did something naughty, with a caption or sign confessing to the crime. I reposted such images from a half-dozen other tumblrs, opened up the blog to submissions, and told my Tumblr colleagues that if they needed filler for the “Radar” promotional spot on Tumblr’s universal dashboard, they could post the Dogshaming bit. Which they apparently did, pretty much immediately.

I left work at the end of the day, and by the time I came home from dinner that night, there were a dozen submissions. By the time I went to bed, there several dozen more. In the morning, there were over a hundred submissions, which I plowed through in a couple hours.

The reason this process ate up time was that I didn’t just post things as they arrived. I had adopted a persona or “character” for the blog voice which did not at all celebrate the cuteness of the criminal dogs. Rather, it was deadpan accusatory voice, a heartless and unmovable Judge of All Dogs, who commented mercilessly on each dog’s bad behavior. In the mind of this persona, all dogs were guilty, and the process of exposing their crimes was my righteous duty. As the blog name indicated, this was a place for the shaming of dogs. This was much funnier, to me, and made the blog more fun to write.

So, after posting and annotating that first day’s glut of submissions, I went on vacation for a long weekend. Of course, being neurotically dependent on the usual social media reward signals, I kept checking the dogshaming blog, and still posting when I could. Yet after another 48 hours, the queue had a backlog of 500+ submissions and questions.

I was vacationing with my family at a beach place in New England, and funnily enough, we all came down with hand + foot + mouth. If you’ve never enjoyed this affliction, one of the symptoms as it progresses is shooting pains in your feet and hands (we were spared the mouth part), followed by the skin on your palms and soles of your feet puffing up and sloughing off in chunks. It’s a wonderful experience, especially watching your toddler daughter shrieking in agony as she staggers around on painful fraying chubby toddler feet.

The dogshaming queue continued to bulge obscenely, and now I was getting emails from eager book publishers and agents pouncing on the next viral idea to rush into print. Blog books were huge then! Right at the same time, buried in the submissions was a message from one of the people who had originally posted one of the first images I’d used to start the blog. This person was more than a little irate that I had, according to their logic, stolen their idea, and they demanded reparations.

In any normal mental state, I might have engaged with the book people and fobbed off or compromised with the ur-dogshamer. But somehow, gazing at the submission queue’s geometrically increasing payload, imagining how any book publisher would just want a cute dog book and not my embittered Dog Judge character, and then contemplating the offended blogger—I just snapped. I was on vacation and my flesh was literally peeling off my body! To the blogger, I replied fine, take the blog, here’s the login. To the book people, I said, this person is in charge of dogshaming now, talk to them. And for my final dogshaming post, I put up a selfie holding a dogshaming-style note reading “I JUST WANT MY LIFE BACK.” Abandoning dogshaming at its viral height was my own ultimate shame-crime. (In the selfie photo, you cannot see the ravaged skin flaking off the palms of my hands, but trust me, it was happening.)

Immediately I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders and soul. I was free! And yet. Was it foolish to turn down a project and book that had fallen into my lap? Probably. Could I have used that sweet book deal money? Certainly. And did at least one Tumblr executive complain, only half-jokingly, that I had given away IP developed on company time without consulting anyone? That did indeed happen.

In a further and yet completely appropriate and foreseeable indignity, the person to whom I gave the blog and book deal immediately deleted all of my posts (including my goodbye selfie), effectively expunging my involvement as the project pivoted seamlessly into a cute dog blog. The blog moved off Tumblr and is still going strong. The book came out in short order, and the franchise receives updated service via annual calendars and even an adult coloring book.

I’ve searched and searched in my shriveled and envious heart for the slightest regret on giving up dogshaming, and I just can’t find any. That was of course my privilege to not have to take work, and I’m fully conscious of it as such, and I very much appreciate the very rare freedom to walk away.

The dogshaming blogger, now at the helm of a multi-platform dogshaming empire, tersely informed me at the time that my posts were deleted because some people said they were offensive. It’s possible! This person also wrote me later in high dudgeon that I had allowed myself to be interviewed by a reporter doing an article on dogshaming, where I had described the history as it transpired. I’m only guessing but I suppose there was concern I might swoop in and demand rights at some point down the road, horning in on all that sweet dogshaming payola. So let me just state clearly and for the record that the current proprietor has all rights to all things dogshaming in perpetuity, if that was really an issue. You’re welcome, by the way.