Dog Memes
Dog memes are captioned dog photographs that split into two families: the Doge line descended from one 2010 Shiba Inu snapshot, and the older advice-animal dogs where the frame supplies a personality and your two lines supply the joke.
Make your own dog meme
Drag any line on the image to move it.
The dog meme collection
Every tile opens in the editor. Near-identical re-uploads have been dropped, and frames whose joke is really about a cat are left to the cat meme collection.
Which one to use
Dog frames divide by structure, and that decides your caption before you write a word. Comparison frames need two labels. Advice-animal frames need a setup and a payoff. Single-scene dogs need one short line.
| Situation | Format to use | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Comparing a strong past version to a weak present one | Buff Doge vs Cheems | Two bodies do the comparison. Label each panel with a year, a version or a name and stop — explaining the contrast kills it. |
| The same comparison, but the weak side is you | Buff Doge vs Crying Cheems | The tears tip it from mockery into self-deprecation, the safer register when you are the one coming off worse. |
| Scattered thoughts rather than one statement | Doge | It wants several short phrases in different places, not two tidy boxes. Fighting that is why most Doge posts look wrong. |
| Everything is on fire and you are pretending otherwise | Dog In Burning House | KC Green drew the punchline already. Your caption only has to name the fire, in one short label. |
| The same idea, faster and more unhinged | Dog On Fire | Less composed than the burning-house frame. Better as a reply than as a standalone post. |
| Deadpan wordplay | Bad Pun Dog | The frame works as a warning label. Readers brace for a pun, which is why a mediocre pun survives here. |
| A joke you know is bad and are proud of | Dad Joke Dog | It carries the smug delivery rather than the pun itself, so it fits jokes that are annoying rather than clever. |
| Waiting for something that will never arrive | Dog Waiting | The longing is in the image. Name only the thing being waited for and let the frame supply the duration. |
| Accepting an outcome you cannot change | Dog Accepting Fate | Resignation, not sadness — a narrower and more useful mood that fits deadlines and bills well. |
| You think someone is lying to you | Suspicious Dog | Side-eye does the accusing. One line, no explanation, no second panel. |
| A mismatch of size, power or budget | Big Dog Small Dog | The mismatch is literal, so the labels can be completely abstract and still read instantly. |
| The same mismatch when you want it to sting | Strong Dog vs Weak Dog | Harsher than Big Dog Small Dog. Use when the comparison should wound rather than just be observed. |
| A transformation joke | Dog vs Werewolf | Before and after in one frame, with the change dramatic rather than gradual. Wrong for slow improvement. |
| Absurd escalation | Kong Godzilla Doge | Only works when scale itself is the joke. Applied to anything else it is decorative noise. |
| Giving deliberately catastrophic advice | Advice Dog | The original advice-animal frame. Reasonable situation on top, disastrous suggestion underneath, in that order. |
| A confidently technical explanation | Intelligent Dog | Reads as someone who has clearly researched this. Best when the payoff is that the research was pointless. |
| Admitting you are out of your depth | I Have No Idea What I Am Doing Dog | The lab goggles read as someone pretending to be qualified. The default frame for work, code and DIY jokes. |
| Shutting someone up affectionately | Lady Holding Dog Mouth Closed | Two characters lets you cast yourself and another person, which no solo dog frame can do. |
| Loyalty, or dragging a friend along | GTA 5 Franklin And His Dog Chop | A person and a dog together, so it fits jokes about a pair rather than about one mood. |
One warning: the Doge frames double as cryptocurrency shorthand, so a Doge post can read as a coin reference whether you meant one or not. If your joke is not about markets, a non-Doge frame reads cleaner.
Captions that work
Written for the frames above, boxes separated. The comparison captions are a pair of labels rather than one sentence split in half, which is the difference between landing and not.
- me in 2019 with a full night of sleep me now, running on coffee and spite
- what i said i would cook this week the takeaway app, opening itself
- every notification on my phone me, calmly opening none of them
- my code on my machine my code on the machine that matters
- the dog when the lead comes out the dog when the vet door opens
- what my cv says i do what i actually do all day
- the driver who marked it as attempted delivery me, home the entire time
- me explaining the plan with total confidence me thirty seconds into the plan
- the puppy that ate the sofa the face that gets away with it
- how i sound in the meeting how i sound describing it afterwards
Where dog memes come from
The dominant dog meme has a precise, documented origin. Kabosu, a rescued Shiba Inu, was photographed by her owner Atsuko Sato and posted on a blog in 2010. That side-eye photograph sat dormant for three years; searches rose from July 2013 and by year end Know Your Meme had named Doge the top meme of the year. Kabosu died of leukaemia on 24 May 2024, aged eighteen.
Cheems is a separate dog routinely confused with the first. His name was Balltze, he lived in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and the photograph everyone uses was uploaded to his Instagram on 4 September 2017. The character emerged in June 2019 via the subreddit r slash dogelore, and the Buff Doge versus Cheems layout went viral in mid-2020. Balltze died of cancer on 18 August 2023, aged twelve.
The burning-house dog is not a photograph. It began as a strip called On Fire, drawn by KC Green for his webcomic Gunshow in 2013. The two-panel crop spread in September 2014 after appearing on Reddit and Imgur without attribution. The original strip runs longer and darker than the crop suggests.
The advice dogs are the oldest layer. Advice animals were among the most common internet memes of the 2000s: an animal on a coloured wheel, an Impact caption split into setup and payoff, one fixed personality each. Advice Dog is the ancestor and Bad Pun Dog, Dad Joke Dog and the rest are its descendants. No source we could verify dates these frames, so this page gives none.
Limits and etiquette
Both famous dogs here are dead, and both were mourned by owners who never sought any of this. Using their faces for a joke is normal and neither owner objected, but that is different from a joke aimed at the animal.
The second issue is Doge and money. A large share of the audience reads any Doge frame as a market reference, which makes it a poor pick for anything financial you did not intend as a coin joke.
The advice-animal dogs are also of their period, so they now work as retro references — usable, but only when the datedness is deliberate.
These are third-party images hosted here so they can be captioned. If one is yours, the DMCA page removes it.
Frequently asked questions
Which dog meme template is used the most?
Doge and its descendants. The photograph of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu, was taken in 2010 and posted by her owner Atsuko Sato that year. Search interest climbed from July 2013 and Know Your Meme named it the top meme of the year. Five of the twenty frames here are Doge derivatives.
Is Cheems the same dog as Doge?
No. Cheems was a different Shiba Inu named Balltze, from Kowloon, Hong Kong. The source photo went up on his Instagram on 4 September 2017 and the character appeared on the subreddit r slash dogelore in June 2019. The Buff Doge versus Cheems layout went viral in mid-2020.
Can I put my own dog in these formats?
Not in the two-panel comparison frames, because half the joke is that the audience already knows which body means strong and which means weak. In the advice-animal layout you can: upload your own photo, keep the Impact caption structure and the frame still works.
Why do the Doge frames use broken grammar?
The scattered lowercase phrasing came out of the same tradition as lolspeak, where deliberately wrong grammar signalled that an animal was doing the talking. On Doge it hardened into a convention: a short modifier plus a noun, never a full sentence.
Which dog frame works best for a work joke?
I Have No Idea What I Am Doing Dog, because the goggles already read as someone bluffing competence. Dog In Burning House suits a project that has gone wrong and is being ignored, and Dog Waiting fits anything about a reply that never came.
Is the burning house dog a meme or a comic?
Both. It began as a strip called On Fire in the webcomic Gunshow by KC Green, published in 2013. The two-panel crop spread in September 2014 after circulating on Reddit and Imgur without attribution, which is why many users have never heard of Green.
Do these dog formats need two text boxes?
The comparison frames do, since a single caption leaves half the image unexplained, and the advice-animal dogs are built for a setup and a punchline. Doge itself is the exception: it wants several short scattered phrases rather than two tidy boxes.