A new breed of celebrity has been pawing at the ankles of internet users but not for treats or walkies, for likes and shares. Over the past few years, videos of animals, pictures of animals and accounts FOR animals have been cropping up all over our screens and we are loving it. Humans have always loved animals; dogs are aptly named ‘man’s best friend’ and crazy cat ladies collect the little furballs to populate their homes. It’s no surprise that being able to see animals 24/7 is a big hit. Grumpy Cat, @mysadcat and @mensweardog are a few internet famous animals that you may know if you haven’t been living under a social-media-void rock. Even if you haven’t seen these accounts, simply google them, they’ll come up, they’re that famous. These accounts promote animal products, food, clothes and even share discount codes straight to our laptop and phone screens. As long as the animals are cute, we don’t mind having them pasted onto our eyes. It’s like adorable conjunctivitis, it’s irritating and it sometimes makes you cry but usually happy tears... Unless it’s one of those animal rescue or neglect videos; pass us the tissues and tell us all it’ll all be okay.

If you take to Instagram and search the hashtag #dogsofinstagram it returns 44,173,430 results.

So that’s forty-four-million-one-hundred-and-seventy-three-thousand-four-hundred-and-thirty which so happens to be a larger number than the population of Canada, Australia and Poland to name a few.

One Instagram user fond of this hashtag is 22-year-old Hayleigh McFarlane. The account however is not hers, it belongs to her rescued Jack Russell, Toby. 29,000 people follow @Lifewithtoby to see pictures of the little dog prancing around in the leaves, adorably chewing a toy or doing something else cute for the camera.

So what makes a person want to put photographs of their four-legged friend online? Is it the money, the new friends networking can bring or just a passion for pet photography? Hayleigh McFarlane tells us all about Toby and his following:

“We rescued Toby back in May 2012 and we (Hayleigh and her boyfriend) think he was roughly a year old. I’ve always had a huge love of photography! I studied it in college back in 2011 but never got the chance to do pet photography so after getting Toby I wanted to document his progress.”

@Lifewithtoby started up around 3 years ago and has cultivated a huge number of followers since the beginning but Hayleigh thinks that 2016 has brought the biggest rise in followers so far. The more followers you have the more business opportunities it can bring to something that was once simply a hobby.

“I work with different companies and if anyone uses Toby’s promotional code I get commission from it.

The companies mainly email me or send me DMs (direct messages) and ask if I want to promote their products. I’ve worked with many different accounts but we are currently working with @barkbox @danielwellington @get_hound and @gurupetfood plus a few more.”

Many people online are making money from their pets. Tom Cox is a man who runs a personal Twitter account (@cox_tom) and several Twitter accounts for his cats (@mysadcat, @mysmugcat and @myswearycat). Tom also writes books, a few of them are normal books but four of these books are about his cats. If this man is selling his books you can assume he is making some pretty good money from his cats adorable little paws and faces. Grumpy Cat –a cat who literally just looks grumpy- is now a patented, trademarked brand! It is evidently very, very possible to make a career out of a pet. Hayleigh admits she hasn’t quite made it this far yet but she isn’t really in it for the money:

“I haven’t really made any money yet. My friend from Austria (who also runs a pet account) and I made around £20 from @pawpack but that was moons ago there are so many promo codes going about. It’s really a hit or a miss if yours is used. I would absolutely love to make a career out of pet photography but it’s a very hard business to get into. Some months would be different from others and it’s possible that I wouldn’t get a steady wage each month. I don’t take time out of my life for this,

I’m always taking my camera on walks and Toby loves posing for the camera. I also have a studio in my house if the weathers rubbish outside. I treasure ever moment I have with Toby.”

All pet owners dread the moment their pet is no longer with them. It’s difficult enough to deal with an animal’s passing without having thousands of people wondering what has happened to the photos. What will Hayleigh do when Toby is no longer around?

“I understand he won’t be here forever. He’s had a huge impact on my life! If and when he passes I would love another rescue dog, I would love to do it all again.”

For some internet users –like Hayleigh- it’s not about the money, it’s not about the fame, it’s just about wanting to share the love you have for your pet with others. Animals are a safe and happy subject, they’re cute, cuddly and they rarely make anybody upset.

Jennifer Jones is an educator at the University of the West of Scotland who has researched social media and is now studying a PhD in exactly that. She –like Hayleigh- loves to share pictures of her pets with her friends online. Jennifer has two greyhounds called Mini and George who don’t mind getting in front of the camera. Jennifer explains why she thinks people post so much animal-related-media online and why she’s guilty of it too:

“People are naturally going put animals online because it’s a safe subject. I put a lot of photographs of my animals online because I’ve got to keep quite a professional identity and the animals act as a bit of a buffer between my private life and my professional life. I used to use my accounts quite politically but actually there’s different ways of being political without it being explicitly political so the dogs are quite a nice buffer for that.”

George and Mini have found a way to make political issues a little less serious online. Through the hands of Jennifer and her boyfriend, Mini masquerades as ‘Councillor Mini the Greyhound’ and George as ‘White Male Greyhound’ on Facebook.

“We use it to mock certain political things that are going on but we make the greyhounds the voices of the politics. My friends and I laugh about it because we kind of give George this whole identity like he’s this total white, chauvinistic, male misogynist. He’s got no concept of personal space and then Mini is the nice one.”

It’s funny to think that all of these internet famous animals have no idea that they’re famous. Is it cruel to use your pet to get likes, shares and even money? Is it fair that they’re the subject of the pictures and videos but you’re the one who receives the praise and the pennies? Jennifer had a final thought on the ethics surrounding social media and pets:

“Ethically, you start to think is this a pet or is it a money spinner? I certainly just use it as a way of keeping my social media free from any drama really because yeah, everybody likes dogs.”

Everybody likes dogs and even if they don’t, they probably like cats. We love our furry or even sometimes scaly companions. You will always be able to find amusing, adorable videos and pictures that make you experience a range of emotions

while on your 5-minutely-scroll of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. We are surrounded by wagging tails online and offline but just remember, for every like you get on your pet’s picture, give them a treat… Unless of course, like Hayleigh you regularly get 790 likes on your pictures. 790 treats in a row cannot be healthy, just like our unhealthy obsession with pets on our screens.

The Dog Who Lives in a Pet Shop

It’s not often you walk into a shop and set eyes on an employee with four legs… Even in a pet shop, it’s odd to see a dog that’s; not on a lead held by an owner, not for sale and freely roaming around. The ‘Pets at Home’ shop in Ayr do not pay Echo the dog any wages even though she attends every single shift her owner does.

Pets at Home allow staff to bring in their pets as long as they are trained properly because they believe the pet shop is a safe environment for animals. Even members of staff working higher up in the more corporate, business side of things have been known to bring their pets to work. Robin McGrath brought his dog Echo into Pets at Home during his first week of work with the company and things went so well that she never left. Robin talks about what it’s like to have your canine counterpart as a colleague:

“From the first day I brought her in, she never left, she’s an absolute

powerhouse, it’s a bit nuts. She gets people who come in to see her and

buy her treats and stuff like that. I can’t take her a walk without her getting

recognised now ‘that’s that dog from Pets at Home’ and it’s one of the most

bizarre things ever”.

With such a big following for animals on social media at the moment, it’s interesting to hear that Echo is well known in the real world, by the people of Ayr. Animals don’t have to be present on the internet to be famous.

How does Echo know not to go further than the shop doors and does she always behave?

“She was trained by my partner who trained her to the best of her ability and

she’s just the best dog ever. She’s the most loyal

and loving dog, she’s my shadow and she just follows me everywhere.

She won’t even go beyond the front doors of

the shop!”

During the interview with Robin, he called Echo a ‘bit of a nutter’ as she began chasing her tail for a few minutes then sat down waiting for love and attention. It’s

evident why Echo has so many fans in Ayr; she’s a fun, loving, adorable little dog.

Robin said that he’s not the only member of staff who brings in a pet:

“My manager brings his dog to work on the odd occasion. His dog is called Zelda, it’s a little Chinese Crested and it’s got no hair at all, it’s a completely

naked dog except it has a huge beard. That’s

actually kind of hysterical because my manager has got a huge beard so it’s

like a tiny version of him.

We have another worker that we just employed recently called Donna and she’s an absolute

star. She’s just got a pup and she’s going to bring

it in too”.

Pets at Home may allow workers to bring in pets but don’t go applying straight away if you want a job where you can bring your 10 ft king cobra to work. If you have a calm, friendly dog or even a cat who doesn’t wander too much maybe Pets at Home is the right place for you to be working. It’s certainly the right place to be shopping, who doesn’t want friendly animals roaming around as you buy supplies for your own pet?

Adopting a dog who is no longer a puppy is never easy, they already have personalities, they haven’t grown up in your company and it’s a possibility they’ve never been trained. Carol Anne McMahon, an animal lover from Wishaw decided to take this a step further when she visited Thailand to help the Soi Dog Foundation, a charity for street dogs. Carol Anne vowed to come home alone without a new four-legged friend. When she arrived at the Soi Dog centre she was volunteering at, she met a timid, female street dog who had never had a home. She fell in love with her big, sad eyes and decided she just had to take her home and show her a better life.

After a lengthy travelling process a few months later, Martha arrived in Scotland to live with Carol Anne. Martha was timid but things were going well and she was becoming more comfortable with her surroundings. One night during a walk this all changed. Martha got spooked during some bad weather and ran off into Wishaw after only being in Scotland for a short time. Obviously, like any pet owner Carol Anne was terrified for her lost dog but even more terrified because of how scared Martha was of people. Knowing that she had many friends from Wishaw on her Facebook profile Carol Anne posted a message and the search began:

LOST AND FACEBOOK FOUND

“she was out all night that night and the weather was terrible. There were hailstones, heavy rain, high winds and it was freezing cold which is obviously not what she’s used to. One of the first things I did was put on my Facebook that she’d ran off and asked people to share it because I’ve got quite a lot of friends in the area.”

“within a couple of hours, the support I had got from people on Facebook and other social media was amazing.”

“People had made sites to find Martha, people had posted her details on missing pet sites, people had done up posters for me…”

“The Soi Dog Family which is a group of people who either have a Soi Dog themselves or they’ve volunteered or they support the charity in some way; they were absolutely fantastic. I had people who were ready to drive up from England to help with the search! It had all been shared so much, there were lots of people out looking for Martha”.“The lady who found her actually lives just around the corner from me and she had seen the post on

Facebook with my phone number. So when she found Martha she was able to give me a phone and I was straight there to pick her up. It really was through the power of social media that I got her back.”

The sharing of Facebook posts with Martha’s ap-pearance and description helped people identify the terrified, lost dog. A network of people willing to share posts and maybe even have a look for the dog themselves really helped with the search. Mar-tha may have been found without Facebook’s help but it definitely created a buzz around the search and brought the dog home faster.

It seems that the internet mixes really well with animals. Social media can share petitions to help animals, show us cute videos, bring adorable pic-tures to our screens, help animals find new homes and even help lost pets to find their way home. The internet is a resource that we can use to make the lives of animals better all while enjoying their exis-tence through videos and pictures. Martha is home safe but many other animals are not. If you see a post about a lost pet, share it, you might even be the share that helps it get home.