I first saw Lobster Dog on February 22nd, 2010. I know the date because I posted the picture to my Facebook wall (at the time, I was unaware of the Photoshop favorite here at Warming Glow as well as FilmDrunk and With Leather. I’ve now put Lobster Dog into so many images that she turns up in Google image searches for a lot of TV shows — I assume that’s how the little guy ended up on the Huffington Post.
Except Lobster Dog — who’s also known as Red Lobster thanks to the Dogfort meme that exploded last November — isn’t a guy. She’s a bitch named Kiki, as I learned from her owner David as we traded emails this week. (I haven’t been that surprised and pleased at a gender reveal since the first time I learned that Samus Aran from Metroid was a woman.)
What follows is the interview I conducted with David, along with several photos of Kiki that are new to the Internet. Be warned: if you’re just here for the TV news, you probably don’t want to read 2000 words of guys talking about dogs.
Warming Glow: First order of business: tell me everything about Kiki. How old is she? What tricks does she know? What’s her favorite treat?
David: You’re going to have to shut me up, because I can go on about my dog all day. Her full name is Kiyohime Valentine. Kiyo and Kiki for short. Kiyohime comes from my favorite folklore, about a strong woman who shapeshifts into a dragon and melts this priest inside a bell to death. The surname Valentine also comes from my youth as a useless Japanophile, it’s the last name of the character Faye from popular anime Cowboy Bebop, which happens to contain a corgi.
She’s 3 years at the time of writing, 26 lbs. Her birthday is July 27th. She comes from both working and show class stock, so she has both ‘brains’ and the ‘beauty’ making her a fine specimen of the pembroke welsh breed. She was in a litter of 7, and one of her siblings is named is “Pepsi.”
Like most Corgis, she’s very intelligent. I took about a year off of work to train her, so she knows many commands and tricks. She’s a great performer and model, though the now famous lobster dog set might have you thinking otherwise. She’s very patient, and great around the camera.
Kiki is quite fond of the e-z cheese style peanut butter canisters, so sometimes I stuff tiny rawhides into a Kong toy, fill it with peanut butter, then freeze it. If I have to leave the house for a bit, these make for much longer entertainment than just ice cubes. She destroys most bones and pig ears, so for casual chewing I try to keep it to the stronger nylabones. I still have a toy that smells like her mom, which I bring out from time to time and she just goes nuts for it. I really need to upload some of the flashlight videos. She goes absolutely ballistic for flashlights.
Please do so. There’s a ready-made forum for their display.
I used to have a youtube channel with videos of her, a few were popular. The channel was deleted a couple years ago when I put up clips from some corgi training dvds I had bought. Originally, my flickr account was just photos of her, at one point there were over 1,000, chronicling every event of her life – until my pro account expired.
Editor’s note:
It does seem like there’s now a built in audience for her. The embrace of the Reddit community with “dogfort” and subreddit “/corgi/” makes me think there’s a venue for that. Also with the shirts that were sold to benefit corgiaid using her image. I don’t know. I should do an AMA there and gauge interest.
Was the lobster costume for Halloween?
The lobster costume was a gift actually, from my old roommate and his girlfriend at the time. Little did they know what an impact that would have. It marked her second halloween, the first year she was in fact, a hot dog. I’ve been really interested in meeting a seamstress to make some custom outfits for her, but those are hard connections to come by. It’s been my dream to get her into a national corgi calendar (I photograph her year round, and I submit to the 3 main corgi specific calendars every year, but we’ve never been accepted) I think the best way would be to make our own.
I dressed her up the year before that as a hot dog (“fun on a bun”), a fairly predictable costume for dogs of her aspect ratio. This past year I was too busy with work, but wanted to fabricate and dress her in business casual, with a pantsuit, glasses, and tiny briefcase. Hopefully we can get something together for this year. I don’t know if she’ll ever outgrow the lobster outfit though.
We shoot so often that we usually don’t dress her up. This might come as bit of a surprise to some, but I don’t think dogs really like wearing clothes.
I agree; I don’t think dogs like wearing costumes. BUT THEY LOOK SO CUTE. In fact, Kiki inspired me to get a lobster costume for my Rottie mix. She didn’t necessarily like it at first, but she got used to it and didn’t mind it. Totally worth doing once a year.
Where do you live and what dog parks do you take Kiki to, so that I may stalk her?
We live in a bungalow in Santa Monica, California. We have a great tiny private yard, and a couple great parks for runs, though this breed tends to tucker out after a mile or two. We used to live in Silverlake, where I tried to go to the dog park up there near the reservoir, but had an awful experience. Instead we tend to avoid dog parks unless specifically meeting with friends. Larger public parks, despite being on-leash are the most convenient.
What happened in Silverlake? Was it hipsters? I bet it was hipsters.
I’m not going to take your bait to publicly indict hipsters for their dog habits, but I’ll tell you what happened. My baby, Red Lobster, was sexually assaulted- raped. She had never been around so many male dogs before, and she was just a puppy at the time, I was trying to socialize her. The owner of the other dog didn’t care at all, in fact she got quite upset that I verbally scolded her dog “NO” to get it off my obviously horrified puppy, as the owner did nothing. Your dog’s actions are your responsibility, lady.
Earlier I had been taking some snaps of Kiki playing with another puppy, when the owner approached me, yelling. ARE YOU TAKING PICTURES OF MY DOG? ARE YOU GOING TO SELL PICTURES OF MY DOG? WHO ARE YOU, WHY DO YOU HAVE THAT CAMERA?? Look, I understand the desire to protect your dog’s image, believe me if anyone does, I do. But this girl desperately needed an attitude adjustment, she was having a nervous breakdown in front of me after bringing her dog to a public dog park. I wasn’t like climbing into her back garden to get covert upskirt shots of her dachshund.
Oooh, dachshund upskirts are the best upskirts!
As I was leaving, I was asked by a stranger if my dog wanted an agent, and that their company would pay to train her for television and represent her “obvious” talent. The whole time was just so scummy, and the dog park itself in Silverlake is an absolute trashcan. No grass, grimey grounds, crowded. The reviews on yelp are mixed, but I’ll never take her there again.
Most people who take a year off of work do something like climb Mount Everest or sail around the world; I applaud your decision to do something worthwhile instead. But what’s your work situation that allows you to take a year off? Did your parents steal Nazi gold or something?
I mostly worked from home over the year. Towards the end of that time, I started going into work, and noticed how bad Kiki’s separation anxiety was. She had been with me almost every hour of every day of her life up until that point, which was great for raising and training her, but she could not understand my disappearances and used to get really upset. So I started bringing her with me to work most days.
How tuned in to Internet culture are you? When did you first notice that she was popping up elsewhere?
Yeah, I’d say I’m fairly into internet culture. Growing up, I was a goon, a part of the SA forums which was a precursor to communities like 4chan. I think my sense of humor and interests back then were informed by the internet at a time before that was completely socially acceptable and average.
I got a handful of comments when I first posted the snap of Kiyo, mostly from friends on the site. Nothing really happened for a while. She appeared in various corgi humor or halloween pet posts from time to time, but I don’t think that was a defining moment where the image was seeded. Since then I’ve seen the picture hosted on some Russian imagehost that showed like 500k views or something ridiculous. I got some emails and texts about her being on sites like digg or reddit when that was happening. I don’t think I was ever explicitly recognized as the photographer/owner before “dogfort,” since the reddit community seems pretty diligent about their internet detective work and crediting people, where the rest of the internet, justifiably, couldn’t care any less. KnowYourMeme and Rocketboom are interesting as well, making in-jokes accessible for the uninitiated via research. They also posted info about the red lobster origin.
I love my dog, but I don’t think I could wrap my head around her being a meme. How do you feel about Kiyo being the Internet sensation that is Lobster Dog/Red Lobster?
I think it’s cool that people were into her before the dogfort meme broke. I think I saw you post something once that you knew about her before she was in vogue. I’d also seen her on various filmdrunk posts that I was pointed to as you mentioned.
The Huffington Post appearance is cool, I love seeing her show up in these bizarre places. I think it’s a shame that she is completely incapable of being aware of any of these concepts. Millions of people around the world know who she is, and she makes them laugh. Her likeness raised over $4k for CorgiAid in less than a week. I get wonderful comments and email about her, and she will never know. I try to spoil and entertain her the best I can, while keeping her away from the perils of celebrity like drug abuse and sexual deviancy. Did you hear about those show corgis that were kidnapped a couple years ago after the dog show? I’m nervous just having people housesit with her when I travel. I should probably stop geo-tagging my shots of her, in case some internet version of Mark Chapman shows up to snuggle her to death.
I’m happy people feel there’s both some humor and poetry to the images of her. There was a discussion about her thousand yard stare somewhere I thought was great. Above all I hope she continues to bring people joy, be it in web comics, TV blogs, or just on her own.
