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Two Kinds of Scroll
Sometimes you scroll because it’s entertaining. The puppy videos, the unlikely friendships, the dogs who seem almost human. That’s fine. It’s fun, and no one needs to justify enjoying it.
But sometimes you scroll because you’re trying to solve something. Your dog won’t stop barking at the neighbours. The itching is getting worse despite the expensive food. You’re thinking about whether a second dog would help with separation anxiety, or make it worse. You need answers, and you’re hoping to find them somewhere in the feed.
That second scroll is where things get complicated.
The algorithm doesn’t know why you’re here. It serves the same content regardless of whether you’re killing time or desperately seeking help for a dog you’re struggling with. It shows you what keeps people watching, what gets shared, what sparks engagement. Whether that content is actually useful for your specific situation, with your specific dog, is not part of the calculation.
Understanding this isn’t about becoming cynical or quitting social media entirely. It’s about knowing what you’re looking at. The feed can be entertaining, inspiring, even occasionally educational. But when you’re in problem-solving mode, when you genuinely need guidance, that’s when it helps to understand what’s actually driving the content you’re seeing.
The Machine Behind the Feed
Social media platforms are businesses. This sounds obvious, but the implications run deeper than most people consider.
The platforms make money primarily through advertising, and advertising revenue scales with time spent scrolling. The longer you watch, the more ads you see, the more money the platform makes. Every feature, every algorithm tweak, every design decision is oriented toward keeping you engaged.
For dog content, engagement doesn’t correlate with accuracy. A confident, dramatic claim about dog behaviour performs better than a nuanced explanation of why it depends on the individual dog. A 60-second “transformation” video gets more shares than a realistic account of the months of patient work behind it. Certainty is more engaging than uncertainty, even when uncertainty is the honest answer.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just how incentives work.
Then there’s the creator layer. The people making the content you’re watching are also, often, running businesses. They’re selling courses, products, memberships, consultations. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are genuinely trying to help dogs and their owners. But their commercial success depends on creating content that performs, and what performs isn’t always what helps.
“The algorithm rewards confidence, not accuracy. Certainty gets shared. Nuance gets scrolled past.”
Consider a trainer who specialises in slow, patient desensitisation work. Their actual method doesn’t make for compelling video. The dog who learns to feel safe around triggers over six months of careful work doesn’t produce a dramatic before-and-after. Meanwhile, a trainer using aversive methods can show you a “transformation” in 60 seconds: the lunging dog who goes suddenly still. What you’re seeing is a dog who’s learned that reacting leads to pain, so they’ve shut down. That’s not confidence. It’s suppression. But it looks impressive, and impressive content gets shared.
Neither the platform nor the creators are primarily optimising for your dog’s welfare. They may care about dogs, genuinely. But the incentive structure rewards engagement, not outcomes. Your dog’s situation, your dog’s worsening anxiety after you tried something you saw online, doesn’t register in their metrics.
The Edit You Don’t See
Every piece of content you watch has been edited. This sounds obvious too, but think about what it actually means.
The trick video that makes a dog look brilliantly trained? That’s the successful take. You didn’t see the 47 attempts that didn’t work, the treats held just off camera, the professional trainer standing behind the phone coaching the owner through it. The dog who “heels perfectly off-leash”? You didn’t see the months of on-leash work, the e-collar hidden under the fur, or the fact that this was filmed in a controlled environment with no distractions.
Time compression is everywhere. A video captioned “we fixed his reactivity in two weeks” is showing you the highlight reel of what was probably months of work, if it worked at all. The before-and-after format is structurally dishonest about how behaviour change actually happens.
And the problems that emerge don’t get posted. The training method that seemed to work until the dog started showing fallout weeks later. The “perfectly socialised” puppy who developed fear reactivity at adolescence. The breed that looked perfect on camera but turned out to be completely wrong for the owner’s actual life. You see the success stories because success stories perform. The failures disappear into the algorithm’s silence.
“Success stories get posted. The problems that emerge don’t.”
This is selection bias at scale. The dogs who make it onto popular accounts are not a representative sample. They’re often professionally trained before being handed to influencers for content. They’re selected for temperament, for trainability, for looking good on camera. The anxious dog, the reactive dog, the dog who struggles, doesn’t get featured. Or they appear only as the “before” picture, never to be seen again.
Learning to Misread
Some of the most-shared dog content features dogs in obvious distress, framed as entertainment.
The “guilty dog” video is a classic example. The dog cowering, looking away, showing the whites of their eyes, ears pinned back. The caption reads “he knows what he did” or “busted!” What you’re actually seeing is a dog displaying appeasement signals. They’re not experiencing guilt, which requires a moral framework dogs don’t possess. They’re responding to their owner’s threatening body language or tone of voice, trying to de-escalate a situation that feels dangerous to them.
Research consistently shows that dogs display these “guilty” behaviours in response to their owner’s anger, regardless of whether they actually did anything wrong. The look isn’t confession. It’s fear. And millions of people watch these videos learning to interpret fear as guilt, potentially punishing their own dogs for having the wrong expression at the wrong time.
The “smiling” dog is another common misread. Dogs don’t smile the way humans do. What often gets captioned as a happy smile, especially in flat-faced breeds, is actually panting from heat stress or breathing difficulty. A French Bulldog with its tongue out on a warm day isn’t grinning. It’s trying to cool down through a compromised airway. But the image is cute, so it gets shared, and the suffering becomes invisible.
“The signs of stress become ‘personality.’ The signs of suffering become ‘quirky.'”
Even the spinning, dancing dog that looks like it’s having fun may be displaying compulsive behaviour, especially in breeds prone to such issues. The dog doesn’t stop because the behaviour is internally driven, not chosen. But the video gets millions of views because it looks entertaining.
Social media hasn’t just given us bad advice. It’s trained us to misread our dogs. And because we’ve been taught to read them wrong, we miss what they’re actually telling us.
When Trends Shape Choices
The gap between what performs online and what’s good for dogs shows up most visibly in the decisions people make before they even have a dog: which one to get.
The breeds that dominate social media are not a coincidence. They’re the dogs who photograph well, whose features trigger our nurturing instincts, whose appearance fits the aesthetic of a curated feed. Large eyes, flat faces, unusual coat colours. These traits perform. They get likes. They get shared. And they influence real purchasing decisions.
Cavoodles have become Australia’s most popular dog, and the appeal is obvious: they look like teddy bears, they photograph beautifully, and they’ve been marketed as “low maintenance” and “hypoallergenic.” Neither claim holds up particularly well. The coat that comes from crossing a Poodle with a Cavalier often creates a grooming challenge: matting close to the skin if not brushed properly and regularly, sometimes requiring full shave-downs. The genetic lottery of crossbreeding means these dogs can inherit health problems from both parent breeds. But you don’t see that in the content. You see the fluffy puppy, perfectly groomed, looking adorable.
Flat-faced breeds like French Bulldogs face a grimmer reality. Their anatomy makes breathing difficult under normal circumstances. In Australian heat, it can be life-threatening. These dogs begin struggling to regulate their body temperature at 28 degrees. Yet social media is full of Frenchies at the beach, panting heavily in ways that get read as “smiling” rather than suffering.
And working breeds like Border Collies and Kelpies, whose incredible feats of agility and obedience make for compelling content, get acquired by suburban owners who can’t provide the hours of mental and physical stimulation these dogs were bred for. The highlight reel shows 30 seconds of frisbee catching. It doesn’t show what happens when a brain built to work has nothing to do.
The common thread: the problems that emerge don’t get posted.
The Training That Looks Impressive
Training content on social media has a format problem. Short-form video rewards methods that produce immediate, visible changes. The drama of transformation.
What actually works for most dogs, the patient, gradual building of new associations and skills, doesn’t make for compelling content. Desensitisation protocols take months. Counter-conditioning is repetitive and undramatic. A dog learning to feel safe around triggers shows progress in tiny increments that you’d barely notice unless you were tracking carefully over time.
So the algorithm amplifies what looks impressive, even when what looks impressive is actually harmful.
That “calm” dog in the transformation video? Often, they’ve learned that showing fear leads to punishment, so they’ve stopped showing it. The behaviour has been suppressed, not resolved. Underneath, they’re still terrified. And suppressed fear has a way of emerging later, often as aggression that seems to “come out of nowhere.”
“What looks like a breakthrough on camera is often a breakdown you can’t see.”
The language is a tell. Trainers who talk about “dominance,” “being the alpha,” “showing them who’s boss,” or promise “guaranteed results” are offering something that sounds good on video but often damages dogs and the trust they have in their owners. Trainers who talk about “thresholds,” “reinforcement,” “stress signals,” and “going at your dog’s pace” are offering something that actually works, but doesn’t perform as well on screen.
This isn’t about attacking individual creators. It’s about understanding that the medium shapes the message. What makes content successful and what makes dogs successful are often different things.
Your Dog Is Not an Aggregate
Social media platforms optimise for aggregate outcomes. They serve content that performs well across millions of users. A system operating at that scale can absorb bad outcomes for individuals: the person who followed advice that made their dog worse, the owner who bought a breed unsuited to their life, the training method that seemed to work until it didn’t. These are noise in a dataset optimised for scale. Your dog’s specific situation doesn’t register.
But your dog is not an aggregate.
They’re not a pattern across millions of other dogs in millions of other contexts. They’re an individual, with their own history, temperament, health, and needs. What worked for the dog in the video may not work for yours. The breed that’s perfect for the influencer’s lifestyle may be wrong for yours. The training method that got millions of shares may be exactly wrong for your dog’s particular anxiety.
“The platform serves what works at scale. Your dog is a sample size of one.”
This is the core mismatch. When you’re scrolling because you’re trying to solve something, when you genuinely need help with this specific dog, you’re asking a system that only speaks in populations. It doesn’t know your dog exists. It can only show you what performed for millions of other people in millions of other contexts, and hope the pattern holds.
When You’re Problem-Solving
So what do you do when you’re scrolling because you need answers, not entertainment?
The first step is recognising the shift. Entertainment scrolling is low stakes. Problem-solving scrolling is where people get hurt, because they’re vulnerable to confident-sounding content and the algorithm serves the same feed regardless of why you’re there.
When you’re in that mode, a few questions can help you evaluate what you’re seeing. Is this person selling something: a course, a product, a subscription? That’s worth knowing. Their commercial success may not align with your dog’s welfare. What are their actual credentials? Anyone can call themselves a dog trainer. Look for qualifications you can verify: Delta Institute, Pet Professional Guild Australia, CCPDT, IAABC, or veterinary credentials. Be wary of “self-taught” experts, “pack leaders,” or anyone who guarantees results. Behaviour doesn’t come with guarantees.
Ask what you’re not seeing. How many takes did this require? How long did the process actually take? What happened after the clip ended?
And consider the match. The dog in the video has a different breed, age, temperament, history, and living situation than yours. Does the advice actually apply to your animal, or is it generic enough to sound applicable while being wrong for your case?
When you’re genuinely trying to help your dog, that’s often the moment to close the app. Consult sources that aren’t optimised for engagement: your vet, a credentialled behaviourist, written resources you can verify. The answers that help your dog probably won’t be the ones that went viral.
What They Know
You don’t have to quit social media. You can scroll for entertainment and enjoy it without guilt. The puppy videos aren’t hurting anyone.
But when you’re trying to solve something, when you’re worried about your dog and looking for answers, remember what you’re looking at. A system that optimises for engagement, not outcomes. Creators whose success depends on making content that performs. An algorithm that serves aggregate patterns to individuals with specific, unseen needs.
Your dog is not an aggregate. They’re not content. They’re not a data point in someone’s engagement metrics.
They’re an individual. Yours.
The platform doesn’t know that. It doesn’t care. It serves what works at scale, and your dog is a sample size of one.
When the stakes are real, when something’s actually wrong, that’s when to step outside the feed. Find a vet who’ll take the time to understand the history. Find a behaviourist with credentials you can check. Read something longer than 60 seconds. Make a phone call.
The algorithm will still be there when you get back.
