A series of photos of a bunch of dogs looking through a shop window at kittens has gone super viral recently, with dozens of popular Twitter accounts sharing the pics.
i'm begging you to look at this
Popular tweet-stealing accounts Typical Girl (@SoDamnTrue) and Common White Girl (@GirlPosts) both tweeted the pictures on Tuesday to their combined audience of over 10 million followers. It all seems to stem from a tweet from Twitter user @luvrlys, who tweeted the pictures of the dogs on Sunday before racking up over 100,000 retweets.
However, a little bit of digging online shows that the kitten-loving pups have gone viral multiple times since 2014 — on Twitter, Tumblr, and, originally the Chinese social media network Weibo.
In 2015, the picture was posted on Tumblr, where it picked up almost 500,000 notes and inspired a subsequent (and extremely meta) text thread of people going nuts over the post.
There are also two separate posts on Tumblr from 2014 that each received almost a million notes. The dogs (and the kittens) are very popular — proving cute animals transcend the life cycles of most memes. Everyone loves dogs, and everyone loves kittens.
Most of the dogs' early fame was generated on Weibo. There, an account under the name Pi Mei Nan Jiu (which BuzzFeed News understands are the names of the four dogs) has over 80,000 fans. The dogs are actually all brothers and sisters, too.
The account is run by a woman in Sichuan, Chengdu, in China. She posts about her dogs all the time. Here they are on a recent trip out:
Look, they celebrated their birthday just the other day.
BuzzFeed News has contacted the admin of Pi Mei Nan Jiu, but in the meantime, you can enjoy more pictures of these very adorable dogs here.
