A woman was filming her dog playing with his favorite toy, only to capture a hysterical moment.
Mollie, 23, lives in Southampton, England, and is the proud owner of fox red Labrador retriever puppy Riley. At just 10 months old, he is full of energy—and, like many puppies, will play until he drops, particularly when it comes to his favorite stuffed Pikachu toy.
“We were clearing out our house and saw this old Build-a-Bear and decided Riley should have it,” Mollie, who gave her first name only, told Newsweek. “It has been his favorite toy, and he shakes it so much all the time. He also uses the tail and goes around in circles!”
When Mollie’s father was due to look after Riley the following day, the pup started getting “zoomies“—so Mollie decided to record a video for her dad, “to show him what he’s getting into.”
What she captured instead has led Riley to go viral and gain a legion of new followers, with the video viewed more than 1.1 million times since being posted to her account @x_mollie_m_x.
Posted on January 7, the clip shows Riley with the Pikachu toy in his mouth, shaking it ferociously from side to side, so much so that the stuffing is beginning to fly out. As Mollie records, Riley keeps going, and the tortured Pikachu is thrown back and forth as Riley shakes his head non-stop.
Finally, Riley stops—and he is suddenly overtaken by a dizzy spell. He trips, stumbles, weaves from side to side and tries to keep his balance, his eyes wide, as his owner bursts out laughing.
“Oh poor dizzy baby,” Mollie wrote in the caption. And it proved massively popular, with more than 230,000 likes, with one commenter joking that Riley was thinking: “Wooo overdid it a wee bit there!”
“Woah I was just playing why’s the room spinning,” another posted, as a third added: “My dog used to do this too and it always seemed like she wanted to hit the floor as hard as possible.”
Humans are far from the only mammals to get dizzy, and researchers have previously claimed that great apes deliberately spin themselves around to get the feeling of dizziness.
In a 2023 study published in Primates, academics examined videos of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans spinning themselves around, and believe it represented behavior similar to humans seeking mind-altering states.
Co-lead Dr. Adriano Lameira told the BBC at the time: “Spinning alters our state of consciousness; it messes up with our body-mind responsiveness and coordination, which make us feel sick, lightheaded, and even elated as in the case on children playing in merry-go-rounds, spinner-wheels and carousels.
“If all great apes seek dizziness, then our ancestors are also highly likely to have done so,” Lameira added. “We asked ourselves what role these behaviors play when it comes to the origins of the human mind.”
In Riley’s case, Mollie added, he simply “lost his balance after shaking [Pikachu] too hard.”
“I love that dog so much,” she said. “I’m glad that he’s got so many views so that other people can love him too!”
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