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The Dogs of Google Street View

They are the unwitting, IDGAF stars of the interactive panoramic visualizer.
Image: Google Street View

Dogs are taking selfiesDogs are now part of the Internet of Things. Dogs are shitting in alignment with the Earth's magnetic field, literally putting themselves on the map. Sometimes, that also means photobombing Google Street View's interactive maps.

Canines are all over Street View, if you look close enough. In fact, I'll go so far to say dogs are the unwitting, IDGAF stars of the worldwide panoramic visualizer.

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When a Street View car rolls through a neighborhood, wherever it may be, if a dog comes wandering into frame it's not going to put on a horse mask and do a jig. It's not going to pull some troll shit, at least not deliberately. It might circle the camera car like this dude in Russia, but it's certainly not going to give the middle finger or later file suit to have its faced blurred. It's going to be itself, which is to say it's going to be a dog.

Curious. Lazy. Maybe a bit skittish at moments, but never aggro, unless provoked. It's going to be chillin' on a fire escape in Portugal:

Or on a backyard-roof in Mexico:

Or even hanging with some buddies, like this gang, presumably strays, lazing around in a lot in Taiwan. By my count, this pack is seven-strong. If you don't believe me, zoom in.

Just as Street View continues to capture stunning images of American poverty, so too can the interactive map feature highlight—in oddly intimate yet impenetrable ways (do you mean to tell me you actually know what that dog is thinking?)—small cultural and regional disparities in the ways we choose to live among dogs.

Look at this black lab-looking dog in the middle of a street, again in Mexico:

 And now look at this French bulldog posted up in front of a butcher shop in Paris. I'm not saying the above dog above is feral—there's simply no telling. Although clearly it lives a more free-ranging life than the Parisian dog, which is restrained, psychically kept in place by a leash.

If you're curious, there's an entire Tumblr, Dogs on Street View, devoted just to, well, dogs on street view. It's arguably the most robust clearinghouse of Google Street-Dog View hits out there. (I scrubbed the French bulldog link from it.) The future of canine cartography is here.

And yet we shouldn't for a second think that dogs will embrace that future, say, if fleets of Google's self-driving cars ever relieve humans who drive Street View vehicles of their duties. After all, dogs love robots, but prefer humans.