Day 27: A letter to your readers (#BEDM).

Dear Internet

Please stop taking photographs of your cat or dog in the mornings, snuggled up on your bed, with cutesy captions like “someone doesn’t want to get up lol111.”

I could tolerate one or two.  But a daily update of your cat or dog, in the same position and the same place? It looks the same each day. You might as well save yourself time and battery power and just repost the first one over and over again.

And why don’t you? Because you think it’ll be boring. I’ve got news for you, I’m afraid. It is just as boring taking a fresh photograph of your dog in bed with you each morning as it is posting the same photograph of your dog in bed with you again and again. To the casual observer, it really is no different.

I’m really not totally convinced I understand what it is you’re trying to achieve.

Also, you may not realise, but you are not the only one doing this all over twitter and facebook. You are one of 15-20 obsessive dog-photographers taking multiple photographs of your dog from different angles in the same position, in the same place. And you may not realise that we can’t actually tell the difference between your dog in bed with you and the dog someone else posted in bed with them 3 minutes earlier.

Admittedly, I am not an animal lover. I don’t see the cutesy appeal. But it just seems so self-indulgent! Yes, I’m aware that half the internet is people taking ‘selfies’ now, and pictures of their child, or their dinner or their drink. The whole internet is self-indulgent, sure.

But the animal thing? I’m no fan of endless pictures or updates about children, but at least they are actual human beings. They still take precedence over animals on my sliding scale of interest. And food? At least you can vicariously think 'ooh, that looks tasty!' But animals?  In bed with fully-grown, functional adults? Every morning?

So do us all a favour, internet. Limit yourself to one picture of your dog a week.

You might love it to bits, but you probably wouldn’t be interested if I distributed a daily photograph of my verruca via social media each morning, would you?

I feel much the same about pictures of you in bed with your dog.