My Dog, Myself

Is he talking about us?

My Dog, Myself
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS

Every day, the pressure to create a Facebook page for my dog, Casey, intensifies.

“Everybody’s doing it,” one dog-obsessed friend told me recently. Another, who doesn’t have a dog but occasionally tries to kidnap mine, e-mails me every week or two demanding that I include a chapter about the canine social-media craze in a book I’m working on about dog people. “It’s the future of the Internet,” he insists, “and you and Casey are going to be left behind!”

I have bravely resisted. For one thing, dogs are not human beings (I know, I know, it’s easy to forget that sometimes). For another, I suspect — although I’m most likely just anthropomorphizing here — that my dog hates Facebook, seeing as that the time I waste on the site each day could be better spent (from my dog’s perspective, at least) walking him.

But then came the big news: Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, adopted a criminally adorable Hungarian sheepdog puppy, named him Beast and created a Facebook page for him.

Zuckerberg is late to the party, of course. Hundreds of thousands of dog-loving Americans have already created Facebook profiles for their four-legged terrors, and many others have joined animal social-networking sites (with names like Fuzzter). Then there are those who, instead of featuring a picture of themselves on their Facebook profile, choose to highlight their smiling pets, which has the unintended consequence of proving that many humans do, in fact, look like their dogs. I used to be skeptical of this (Winston Churchill may have looked like a bulldog, but he spent his life with poodles), but several studies appear to prove it.

Do I look like Casey? Why don’t you check out the Facebook profile I just created for him and let me know?