Internet culture has memes as one of its forms of expression and they serve to amuse users and also to express general ideas. It is an image that, if it manages to connect enough with people, can go viral on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagramin addition to being used in private conversations.
Some of the most popular internet memes have pets like dogs, cats, and even hamsters as protagonists, so their images are widely disseminated, but without knowing their names.
These are some of the animals that went viral on the internet:
Cheems (Baltze)
The original name of the dog that inspired the meme, called “cheems”, is Balltze. The animal, of the shiba inu breed, went viral after its owner uploaded a photo on his Instagram profile in 2017 and went viral on Reddit forums two years later thanks to a user who edited it to use it in a meme.
“You can only say ‘cheemsburbger’” is the comment that later gave the iconic mascot figure the name “Cheems”. After spreading on Reddit, the meme was viralized on other social networks with different variations, but with the main characteristic of mispronouncing some words.
Currently, Balltze’s original photo accumulates a total of 89,550 likes on Instagram.
staring hamster
The hamster looking at the camera meme was first recorded in 2019 by a tiktok video by user @beanboy22 and went viral after another user, but on Instagram, edited the original video to make it look like it’s just about the animal staring at the camera.
Another variant of the same meme is a new edition made on Twitter in which the hamster and the singer are seen Kanye-West in a fake video call.
The hamster can currently be seen in Instagram filters mimicking the style of the fake video call that made it go viral.
Grumpy Cat (Trardar Willow)
The grumpy cat or angry cat meme features a snowshoe cat named Tardar Sauce, from the United States, famous for her curious facial expression that gives the impression of being constantly annoyed.
The original photos that inspired the meme of Grumpy Cat were published in 2012 by their owners in photos of Reddit and they were altered before appearing in media such as BuzzFeed, where it gained notoriety.
The cat on the table
This meme features a cat named smudge and who appears in a photo sitting in front of a plate of salad. The variation of this photo, in which a screaming woman appears, is the most popular and the one that finally went viral in 2019.
That year the profile of Instagram from Smudge, whose first photo is a cropped version of the original photo with the caption “if you’re going to post pictures of my face, at least tag me.”
Smudge’s Instagram account currently has 1.6 million followers.
Doge
Another shiba inu dog known worldwide is the one that inspired the meme Doge, a slang to say dog (perro) in English. The real name of the pet is Kabosu.
In 2010, the Japanese initial level teacher Atsuko Sato published photographs in which Kabosu appears and one of them was the one that originated the viral meme on social networks.
Kabosu’s image was also used to create a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin as an alternative to Bitcoin and, currently, his Instagram profile has 379 thousand followers.
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