STORY BY:
Sarah Kate Horsley
DESIGN BY:
Graham Humphreys
What’s the new craze around social media right now? Dog Instagram accounts. People of all ages have started Instagram accounts to show off their dogs to their followers and give their furry friends the platform and attention they deserve.
With the global rise in dog-based Instagram accounts, a few students at The University of Alabama joined the trend. Lydia Stimpson, a senior at UA, is one of many dog owners and students who post their pets on social media.
When asked why she wanted to make an Instagram account for her dog, Stimpson responded, “I’m obsessed with my dog, and I wanted everyone else to be obsessed with him, too.”
Frazier exploring the outdoors, in Mobile, Alabama, with his backpack on.
She rescued her pitbull-lab mix, Frazier, from a shelter in Mobile, Alabama. Frazier’s Instagram handle is @frazierthegreatest, and his account features photos of him with his human family members, in the yard and going on adventures with his parents. Stimpson explained that she used to post only occasionally on the account, but once her parents found out about the page, they would send her pictures every day to post of Frazier.
A key characteristic of many dog accounts like this is that the owners post captions from the dog’s perspective. For example, in one of Frazier’s more recent Instagram posts, the caption reads, “Check out my new red collar!!! Got it last week!”
Mary Gullage, a fellow UA senior, has an older black and white Shih Tzu named Cubby for whom she runs an Instagram account. She said, “I wanted people to see the precious photos that I have taken of Cubby and wanted to share with my friends and family.”
Gullage highlighted that she uses her dog’s Instagram to express Cubby’s personality. She describes Cubby as “a hot mess, but in a good way. Some of his posts consist of his fun bunny personality, while others are him when he’s being sleepy and adorable.”
She, like Stimpson, wrote each caption from her pet’s point of view in the way that she felt that Cubby would communicate if he could. She said she wishes Cubby could get famous off his Instagram, but her primary audience was always friends and family.
Another senior at UA, Gracie Hussey, formed a joint Instagram account for all three of her Goldendoodles. It started with just two, Murphy and Maxwell, but they adopted a sister named Millie in the past year. She wrote captions in the same way as Stimpson and Gullage, making them from the dogs’ perspectives. According to Hussey, her dogs are her and her family’s whole world, which is reflected in the dogs’ Instagram page.
Hussey explained, “I made the account when I came to college as a way to stay connected with them because I knew how much I would miss them.” The account allowed her to keep all her videos and pictures of her dogs in one place where she could always look when she missed them.
Since dogs are such an essential part of their owners’ lives, it makes sense that people are starting to make Instagram accounts for their dogs to keep them close. Especially for students adjusting to no longer living with their childhood pets, creating an Instagram account for one’s furry friends is such a special way to show off and keep adorable pictures of them in one place where everyone can see them.
Cubby, the black and white shih-tzu posing for another post on his Instagram account.
