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Little Corgi Leads 7 Stolen Dogs 10 Miles Back Home, and People Are Obsessed

The video of the dogs has racked up over 230 million views, as it seems specifically engineered for wild social media success.

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In the age of AI-generated videos that go viral before one person in the comments even bothers to question if the video of an alien ship hovering over Manhattan is real, it’s getting harder to trust anything that looks even slightly unbelievable. This is especially true when animals are involved.

That’s the case with a story out of China about a pack of seven dogs trekking 17 kilometers home through sub-zero temperatures? That should set off alarms. And yet, this story—at least for now—seems to have just enough verification to hold up.

The viral footage, first posted in mid-March, shows a group of dogs walking in a pack along a highway in Changchun, China. The fearless leader corgi, nicknamed Dapang (“big fatty”), periodically looks back as if doing a headcount, while the others cluster around an injured shepherd to offer protection.

The video racked up over 230 million views, as it seems specifically engineered for wild social media success.

A Little Corgi Led 7 Stolen Dogs 10 Miles Back Home, and People Are Losing It

Feel like you can’t trust anything anymore, so it makes sense that in the days that followed, reality started to blur. Some viewers began thinking the dogs had narrowly escaped the grasp of dog meat butchers, a belief that most certainly has its roots in tired old racist tropes. Others believe the dogs wandered off while chasing a female in heat. Others still, the more cynical of the bunch, like myself, wondered if the whole thing was even real in the first place, perhaps some AI-generated nonsense.

According to the South China Morning Post, a pack of dogs is very real, but the truth of their adventure is much more boring than people imagined. The dogs all hail from a small village not too far from where the video was taken. The dogs typically all roam around the village together. Apparently, they had all wandered off a little farther than usual. A local stray-dog organization called the Bitter Coffee Stray Dog Base sent volunteers with drones to track down the dogs and bring them back to their owners.

There was, unfortunately, no great escape from dog-meat butchers, and thankfully, no AI involved in the creation of the story. It’s just the tale of some loose dogs that, when recorded walking together along the side of the road, excludes just enough pertinent information to fill in the gaps with your own wildly imaginative tale that will always be better than the real thing.

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