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Dogs Invented Social Media

Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea from canines

Jay Sizemore
3 min readFeb 19, 2022
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

My dog gets depressed when he doesn’t get to go on his walk. He’ll simply lay in his crate, or curl up on the couch, and cast his sad eyes in my direction for hours at a time, attempting to guilt trip me into retrieving his leash from its hook by the door and uttering the magic words he longs to hear. I realized the other day that this has next to nothing to do with walking, exercise, or simply the joy of being outside for thirty minutes. No, my dog is addicted to the doggy equivalent of social media.

He’s not sad because he isn’t walking. He’s sad because he isn’t pissing on the spots where he has seen other dogs pissing from his view of the sidewalk, staring out our bedroom windows. He’s sad because he isn’t sniffing those spots until his mouth runneth over with saliva, drinking in the delicious odors of his rivals, but more importantly, getting updated on all their weekly stories and activities. I realized with a dawning fascination that all this pissing wasn’t about the marking of territorial boundaries, competing for who owns the most square footage of the neighborhood, it was simply a matter of staying connected through a complex and odoriferous network of urine streams.

We think a dog needs to pee on a tree to let the other dogs know who is boss. In actuality, he is…

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Jay Sizemore
Jay Sizemore

Written by Jay Sizemore

Provocative truth teller, author of APNEA & Ignore the Dead. Cat dad. Dog dad. Husband. Currently working from Portland, Oregon. Learn more at: Jaysizemore.com.

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