Wow! That Dog did a thing! 

BREAKING NEWS: Dog notices house catches fire while owners sleep, runs outside and alerts neighbors!
 
 
HEARTWARMING: Dog stays by owner's side while they go through chemotherapy
 
 
INCREDIBLE!!: Dog finds hiker who got lost in the woods
 
 
 
If you're on the internet you're probably familiar with this kind of story. There's an animal, typically a dog, and they do some kind of cool thing, and it ends up making the news or going viral on social media. Humans have made a big deal out of animals who go "above and beyond" since Lassie and Old Yeller, and farther back too. 
 
And I mean, that's cool I guess. It's always neat hearing about dogs as a break from all the stories about poverty and war and stuff, but am I the only one that finds it a little.. pandering? Like, yes it's great that some old person fell down and their dog started barking, but is that really the threshold for what makes a dog newsworthy? 
 
Maybe I'm just being a hater here, but I find that so many of these stories set the bar so low for the capacity of animals in general, so that the media can make it feel more exceptional when they do something that's relatively normal. And I think there's a real danger of that idea spreading into the common perception as well. Like, when we say that it's amazing that a dog will lay with a sick human, the implication is that most animals don't have any empathy for the humans in their lives, or can't feel empathy at all. When we choose to make a hero out of a dog that barks when a robber breaks into someone's house, that sentiment implies that most dogs are dumb and lazy and can't recognize context. When we say it's incredible a dog uses their nose to find a human, in some ways we're saying all the dogs that don't have that job couldn't do the same thing. Dogs are in general mediocre, but these hero dogs are special. 
 
It's not that I don't think we shouldn't idolize and tell stories of exceptional dogs, but I think in the world we exist in where dogs are so infantalized, there's a danger in news stations knowing people are going to go crazy for that dog that knows how to do things that most dogs can do, but framed under this lens of a feel good puff piece.
 
Or, to put it another way, I think it would be awesome to tell a story about a doctor who does a 12 hour heart surgery to save the life of a child that was in a car crash, that's fantastic. But I think if the vast majority of the stories you heard were more like "Local Doctor cures cough!", it'd start to make it seem like doctors really aren't doing all that much. And that's not even considering the fact that dogs are already viewed as lesser within our society, so that negative enforcement goes way harder against them than it does other humans.
 
It's especially frustrating because at the end of the day the thing limiting most dogs from being amazing isn't their capability, or their sentience. It's us. We've taken these animals and brought them so fully and completely into our world, where they live their whole lives as extensions of who we want them to be. Don't bark, don't pee inside, don't leave the house without being chained to a human. Some of these things are practical realities of the way that dogs exist in our world. But also we stop dogs from expressing themselves in the way that dogs do. And when we take everything canine away from dogs, what's left? 
 
Maybe this is just me, but stories in the news of dogs doing things read like celebrations of dogs functioning at all as living beings, and there's something profoundly heartbreaking about that. I want to celebrate dogs for how incredible they are. How amazing they can be. But I'm terrified that somewhere along the way the message gets lost, and dogs end up losing another piece of their autonomy. 
 
I think my partner does incredible things every day, but when I read about the things that dogs are doing on cable TV I don't think about how great those dogs are, I just think of how most people out there clearly don't understand how amazing dogs really are. If my house was on fire I'm sure my partner would start barking. If I fell down and hurt myself I'm sure he'd get help. But I try my best to help him be as amazing as he can be. It's just hard not to find it sad imagining someone reading stories of amazing dogs in the world doing amazing things, while discounting the dog they have in their life that's just never had the chance. 
 
Every dog should have the chance to be amazing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (October 2026) 
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