A YouTube video made by University of Texas students showing a dog brushing his teeth, putting on a shirt, reading a magazine and doing other human activities to get ready for the day has had more than 1.4 million hits on the Internet.
The class assignment for Charli Kilpatrick and four other UT students — Jacqueline Hesson, Sally Ngo, Carolyn Volk and Alison Herschap — stars Kilpatrick’s year-old Labrador retriever named Dudley. It’s called “Ruff Dog Day.”
“We sat down one night and uploaded it and were fretting over how to get 1,000 views,” Kilpatrick said.
“No way did I think we’d get one million views.” The video, which hit the Web on Oct. 14, has now aired on “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show,” Kilpatrick said.
It shows Dudley with human hands (actually Kilpatrick’s) waking up to his cellphone alarm, putting on a shirt, brushing his teeth, eating a sandwich, wiping his mouth with a napkin, switching channels on a television and finally sitting behind the wheel of a car.
Kilpatrick said it took half an hour to shoot. Dudley was pretty relaxed because he had spent the previous day running all over a ranch, she said. He did balk at some points, she said. “He was not keen on letting me put a toothbrush in his mouth, so I dunked the toothbrush first into a can of dog food,” she said.
It also was hard getting Dudley to eat a sandwich like a person would, she said. The dog “just inhaled” five sandwiches before Kilpatrick figured out she had to cover the whole sandwich with her hand so Dudley could only take small nibbles, she said.
The video was shot for a communications class on celebrity culture. The assignment was to create a video and learn about the value of circulation, said Kilpatrick. “One of the things that surprised me most was the views coming from other countries,” she said. “We got 17,000 views from Poland the first week.”
Kilpatrick, 22, said she plans to go to law school next year.
“Maybe this will push me toward entertainment law,” she said.
Dudley has remained unemployed, she said.
~ Courtesy of Austin American-Statesman
Tags: Ruff Dog Day, UT class assignment, Youtube Dog
