Dogfishing: why posing on dating apps with other people’s pets won’t help you find love
- Borrowing someone else’s pet for a dating profile as bait is a trick, generally used by men, to pretend they have nurturing qualities
- Sometimes women subconsciously equate things like how a man treats his dog with how he would treat a partner, an online dating coach says
On Tinder, Avery Chuang developed a bad habit: she almost always swiped right on guys with a ridiculously adorable dog photo. It’s not a high standard to go by, the 25-year-old Californian admitted, but it helped her find men who are dog owners like herself – presuming that, of course, the featured pup is theirs.
She encountered her fair share of dog-baiters on dating apps (which she no longer uses since they are “addictive and demoralising”). Most men were upfront in conversation with Chuang, but a few did slip through the cracks until she pieced it together.
There was a guy Chuang found attractive and charming and normal – until he turned around and questioned her for probing about his dog. And there was another who profusely apologised for displaying a friendly corgi that wasn’t his (after she called him out) and then ghosted her.
Dogs, notably adorable photos of dogs, are a ubiquitous aspect of dating. They’re convenient icebreakers on apps and on first dates. They add a nugget of personality to a profile. On Apple’s App Store, Bumble features a photo of a bespectacled man cuddling a Goldendoodle dog to insinuate how likeable that is. There’s also Dig, a new dating app specifically for dog owners.
This cultural obsession with dogs on the apps has spiralled into another problem: daters are posting photos of pups they do not own, to attract matches. “Dogfishing” is not exactly a lie – the person did take a photo with that dog – but to some daters, it feels like a veiled form of deception. And things can get awkward fast when a date realises that the pet in the profile solely exists as bait.