Not a mystery beast, just a dog

Why have so many people seemingly lost all critical faculties when seeing animals?

I’ve seen two examples this week of people capturing imagery of dogs and then creating absurdly dramatic context to indicate that they aren’t dogs. What’s going on here? I get it if it’s an unusual animal. But these are just regular dogs that have been turned into mysterious monsters in the minds of the viewer.

The Black Dog on the side of the road

The first example is a video of a family driving down a road at night and encountering an older black dog (with a graying muzzle) along the grass. The accompanying video reveals their excitement and confusion about what they are seeing:

While the image is a bit blurry, the video itself is clear enough to show this not the “robust” and “enigmatic animal” that was reported by the news.

Have these people never seen a dog?

I think a few things are going on here. First, it’s night and maybe the camera on the phone is enhancing the light so that, to us looking at the video, it’s obvious. But to the witnesses at the time, maybe they were freaked out because they couldn’t see enough. Still, the video should never have gotten news coverage. With clickbait as lucrative as it is these days, even ridiculous videos get attention even just so an audience can complain about them.

Secondly, the headline of the news story gives us a clue about why people might be on edge: Mysterious animal surprises in Puebla after unexplained cattle deaths.

This sighting adds to a series of unexplained cattle deaths in the region, where the animals showed signs of violence, which has alarmed the local community.

So, people are concerned about recent mysterious livestock deaths. Feral dogs are suspect. With countless historical examples to draw from, we know that people look for a culprit when they are afraid. It’s not clear if the family knew about the story. Or if the original story was sensationalized.

Finally, even if the witnesses knew this was a dog, they still may have posted it on socials to try to tell a story for attention. Social media is the real reason why we see so many more silly shares like this. Even when the cause is obvious, if imagination is applied, people see a bipedal animal. Or the black color breaks up the typical outline we would expect to form a dog. The dog’s sad face breaks my heart, as does the crazy speculation about it.

The dog in the woods

The next example showed up in my Pop Cryptid Facebook feed from the Rocky Mountain Sasquatch Organization, a very active page that will post marginal content in order to keep the followers constantly engaged. In this case, they posted a pic of a dog and asked if people had thoughts….

They certainly did. They thought it was a dog.

Yeah, some said it was a wolf. But there is no location indicated so it’s baseless to jump to that conclusion. There is no sense in making any judgment on what’s in a photo with no context.

Maybe it’s “mysterious” because it looks like it doesn’t have a head (an artifact from the camera, perhaps). People also assumed it was very large, but you can’t tell that from the image.

Some are going to gravitate to these kinds of images to support their supernatural beliefs in werewolves or dogmen. Clearly, this is not viable evidence of that.

Social silos

It’s disturbing that online audiences get so comfortable existing in their belief silos that everything becomes evidence for that thing they deeply believe in. The rest of us, who aren’t in that frame of mind, just don’t see what they do. This is why you need to 1. get out of those silos, 2. be the voice of reason when necessary.

It would be really great if reason prevailed, and if this kind of goofiness wasn’t so popular. Unfortunately, we aren’t getting out of these strange times anytime soon. The streams of weird content (framed as weird, even when it’s not) encourages further social slides into irrational ideas about the world and more of the same content. It seems like we aren’t going to be taking a rational turn any time soon. We’re on edge, and extreme things really are happening.

The online environment provides a means to dispute the claim, but more often, it provides a platform for more bunkum, and worse.