[11] Corgi Puppies For Sale At Alameda 10 Easy Ways To Facilitate Corgi Puppies For Sale At Alameda

If your Facebook news feed is brimming with pictures and videos of pets, you can blame it all on Grumpy Cat and Jiffpom.

The cat that appears to be perennially ticked off and the world’s cutest Pomeranian dog launched the pets-on-social-media movement, so much so that if your pet doesn’t have its own Facebook page, YouTube and Instagram accounts, then what’s the point of being domesticated?

Grumpy Cat began her trend-setting avalanche on Sept. 22, 2012, when a picture of the frowning kitten was posted on Reddit. People accused her owners of some photo manipulation, so they posted a video on YouTube, and a star was born.

In almost five years, Grumpy Cat, whose real name is Tardar Sauce, has tossed the internet around like a mouse full of catnip. She has almost 9 million followers on Facebook, and the 55-second video proving that her glare is legit, has been viewed more than 20 million times.

Jiff, who looks like a stuffed bear that came to life, has managed to enchant almost 1.5 million people to like his Facebook page, and another 4.7 million fans follow his over-the-top cuteness on Instagram.

How’s your social media status looking compared to theirs?

A survey conducted by pet nutrition and health care provider Mars Petcare, and released earlier this year, reveals that 65 percent of all pet owners post their pets’ pictures on social media at least twice a week. They also admitted that their pets’ social media accounts were far more popular than their own.

Of those surveyed, about a third said they post as much about their pets as they do their human family, and 13 percent said they posted more pictures of their pets than their family. Sorry Junior, Spot is just more interesting.

Social media seems a perfect fit for pets and their over proud parents. They can share as many pictures and stories as they like, but they don’t have to force anyone to look at them.

That concept is what led Mitch Mariani to create a Facebook account for his Maltese pup, SiAna.

“I started her page so people would know her story,” Mariani says, “but the main reason was I didn’t want to annoy my friends by constantly sending them photos of my dog.”

SiAna now has about 600 followers on Facebook, and the number is rising. Mariani, of Morgan Hill, says his intentions for the page have shifted a bit. After he started posting photos of SiAna wearing custom-designed clothes that he makes with a sewing machine he inherited from his grandmother, he started hearing back from people — many of them strangers — on how much joy the little dog brings into their lives.

Cheering up friends as well as herself is what led East Bay’s Marcela Davison Aviles to create a Facebook page for her family’s dogs. The Havanese Social Club was started to combat the negative and political news that was showing up in her news feed. It was all getting too depressing, Aviles says, and she figured she wasn’t alone.

Batman to the rescue, along with the rest of the Havanese Social Club. (Courtesy of Marcela Davison Aviles)

Aviles, a marketing consultant to nonprofit groups, is also an amateur photographer and found that her Havanese dogs — Harry, Calpurnia, Atticus and Miguel — are keen on dressing up and having their pictures made. So a few times a week she posts pictures of the foursome being awesome.

Naomi Thorne and her wife, Katherine, are Realtors in Marin, where they share their home with two loveable cats, Chloe and Kirby, who have become YouTube stars. The housing market slows down in the winter, Naomi Thorne says, so the pair decided to fill those idle hours by making a parody video of Adele’s mega hit “Hello”, naturally starring their cats.

Katherine Thorne wrote new lyrics, and the couple worked together to film and edit the video, which now has more than 160,000 views on YouTube.

“This project was born out of our adoration for our wonderful animals who always succeed at making us laugh,” Naomi Thorne says. “After we made the first music video and it was well received, we decided to make a couple others.”

The social media lives of pets can also extend beyond the computer screen to meetups and gatherings — the word spread through sites and social network pages.

In April, corgi lovers met in San Francisco at an event put together by Upload VR, combining virtual reality technology with a corgi meetup. People checked out the latest virtual reality tech and video games while showing some love to about 40 corgis in attendance.

Basil, left, and friend during a meetup at a corgi event in San Francisco in March. (Courtesy Allie Maltzman)

Amy Doi, of San Francisco, and Linus, her 3-year-old corgi, discovered the event through a corgi Facebook group she belongs to. Linus has his own Instagram handle (@linusthecorgi), and has about 12,700 followers.

“There’s definitely a community here,” she says.

Doi made friends with other corgi owners and has attended other meetups in the Bay Area, including some in Mountain View and San Jose.

Similarly, Ed Guillen and Jessica Fender, of Richmond, brought their corgi, Rabanitos — little radish in Spanish — to the meetup. The virtual reality event was interesting to them, but the hook, they said, was meeting other corgis and their human parents.

“Something I’ve learned about people who also have corgis is they want to do the same things as us,” Guillen says. “It’s very social.”

Rabanitos, only a year old, would rather play with other people than other dogs, Fender says, but on this day he was happily sniffing fellow corgis and playing along.

Pet parents also have discovered that social media is a way to bring awareness to pet issues and to do good. Marni the Dog, from New York, has 2.1 million Instagram followers. She devotes herself to advocating for the adoption of older pets. She was 10 years old and had a raft of medical issues that some considered made her unadoptable, but she’s had the last laugh.

@Nala_cat uses Instagram success — she has 3.4 million followers — as a platform to encourage shelter adoptions as well as responsible ownership and spay/neutering.

Los Angeles’ @Hamlet_the_pig definitely has a Hollywood vibe, but she makes personal appearances and raises money for several charities.

Theodore, a pit bull rescued as a puppy from a huge dog fighting operation, has learned how to enjoy himself. (Courtesy of Trish McMillan Loehr)

Trish McMillan Loehr, who runs Loehr Animal Behavior in Weaverville, N.C., has a popular Facebook page for her dog, Theodore, and has even gotten the term “pibbling” accepted into the Urban Dictionary. Pibbling is defined as exuberant canine silliness. She posts a photo or video almost daily, along with animal training tips.

Theodore’s page goes beyond entertaining, however. The 50-pound pit bull started life in an illegal dogfighting ring. He was just a few months old in 2013 when he was rescued, along with 366 of his friends, in the second largest dogfighting ring bust in the country. For the next 8 months he was known as Dog #947 in a temporary animal shelter until Loehr adopted him.

“Having a very popular dog Facebook page has overall been a positive in our lives,” Loehr says. “We get to show off how cute and funny Theodore is while highlighting issues related to pit bulls in general — discriminatory legislation, myths — as well as victims of dogfighting in particular. It’s hard to believe that up until a few years ago, dogs seized from dogfighting properties were often euthanized without assessments.”

It takes time and effort to meet those social media obligations, but Loehr says it’s been worth it.

“As a dog trainer, I often also slip a few dog training tips in as well,” she says. “Many of Theodore’s friends are now lining their bathtubs with peanut butter to make bathtime less traumatic. It’s pretty amazing to me that a dog from this background is now my best helper in my dog training business; he tires out board-and-train dogs, helps me teach reactive dogs not to lunge and bark, and teaches shy or socially awkward dogs how to play.”

Little SiAna’s message also is of helping others, none more perhaps than her owner. Mariani took care of his grandmother, and when she died, he had a hole in his life.

After doing some research on breeds, he picked the Maltese, a gentle and playful small dog with tons of personality and flowing hair. Before he had even found a dog, he’d picked out a name — the last five letters in Louisiana, paying homage to his family’s Louisiana roots.

Mitch Mariani with his dog, SiAna, who is modeling her custom-made Princess outfit. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

SiAna Sparkle has filled Mariani’s life with much joy, and the marketing manager for his family’s Morgan Hill cherry and apricot operation knew she could help others.

In addition to SiAna’s star status on Facebook, Mariani also donates food to help feed other pets, making the donations with stickers that say #WeCareCan.

“I’m hoping that will encourage other people to do the same,” Mariani says. “If a little dog can do it, so can they.”

SiAna, who is a retired show dog, also is being trained to be a therapy dog, visiting hospitals and convalescent homes.

Managing the social media lives of pets can be a detriment to the pet owner’s own social life. Videos of SiAna can take up to five hours to film, edit and upload, but Mariani considers it time well spent.

The trend of pets on social media doesn’t appear to be slacking. The Mars Petcare survey revealed that one in six pet owners have created a social media account for their pets and spend more time on it than they do their own.

“It’s worth it,” Mariani says, “to see people’s reactions. They just get so excited, and people tell me they look forward to seeing the next photo or video.”

Staff writer Angela Ruggiero contributed to this report.

Report an errorPolicies and StandardsContact Us
[11] Corgi Puppies For Sale At Alameda 10 Easy Ways To Facilitate Corgi Puppies For Sale At Alameda | corgi puppies for sale at alameda