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Bad News About That Corgi Leading a Pack of Stolen Dogs Home

The story gained traction not because it was true, but because it felt true. Or, maybe more accurately, people wanted it to be true.

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Last week, when I wrote about the story of those dogs in China that had supposedly run away from some form of peril and walked a great distance in freezing temperatures until they made it back home, I approached the subject with caution and skepticism. That’s because most of the internet is just a bunch of bot-controlled AI-created bulls—t nowadays. So yeah, you can’t really trust anything anymore.

There was a specific weirdness to the way the narrative unfolded. Maybe it was AI. Or maybe it was just people doing what the internet does best, filling in gaps with emotionally satisfying fiction. Either way, I leaned on it being true-ish since multiple seemingly credible outlets were verifying it, to a degree.

CNN is now definitely reporting that it was all a lie—but there was a ring of truth to it.

That Viral Dog Escape Story? It Was Confirmed Fake.

The viral video showed a pack of dogs huddled together on the side of a busy road in China. That alone was enough to trigger a flood of fanciful storytelling. Social media quickly transformed the clip into a cinematic tale of escape and canine dare-doing: seven dogs, allegedly stolen to be chopped to bits by the dastardly Chinese dog meat trade (super racist, btw), broke free and traveled miles back home, led by a heroic corgi. It was Homeward Bound, but real and severely lacking Michael J. Fox’s vocal charms.

At first, the story gained traction not because it was true, but because it felt true. Or, maybe more accurately, people wanted it to be true.

The reality is closer to the much less cinematic, much more mundane explanation provided by Chinese news outlets and the one I provided in my original article: local reporting confirmed the dogs belonged to nearby villagers and were just roaming around, as they do.

 The reason they appeared so fixated and tightly grouped? Apparently, a German shepherd among them was in heat. That’s it. No daring escape from the grasp of Chinese dog butchers who neatly fit into the stereotypes of Chinese people that everyone on that cesspool of Twitter/X believes. It was just some dogs on a stroll, and one of them was super horny.

I guess that doesn’t fit neatly into the Disneyfied version of events everyone wanted to believe.

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