The Internet’s favorite dog has died, her owner announced. Kabosu, the Shiba Inu dog who inspired the creation of the Doge meme, had been very ill since 2022.
She’s all over the internet, going by the name “Doge”: Kabosu, the adorable dog who inspired one of the world’s most famous memes, is dead. Her owner announced the sad news on May 24, 2024 on her blog, specifying that the dog “ quietly extinguished “, in his sleep. Aged 18, Kabosu was diagnosed in November 2022 with leukemia and liver disease.
“ We will hold a farewell party for Kabosu on Sunday, May 26, in Narita », Also indicated its owner. On social media, where the animal was extremely popular, many people are paying tribute to it in the best way possible: with memes.
The Kabosu dog, inspiration for the Doge meme and internet star
Kabosu went viral in 2010, when her owner shared several photos of the dog on her blog. In one of these photos, the dog was seen sitting on a sofa, looking sideways at the camera, with her eyebrows raised and a questioning look on her face — it’s this iconic posture that made her an internet star. Shared on Reddit, then on Tumblr, the image of Kabosu quickly found itself at the center of numerous absurd memes, based on words in English and written in Comic Sans MS, giving the dog a look of wonder or questioning.
In a very short time, Doge has become one of the most used memes, and therefore one of the pillars of Internet culture. The popularity of the meme was such that Kabosu even inspired the creation of a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, in 2013. The latter, originally created as a joke, was thought to be a digital currency with no value and no use.
But the dog’s popularity helped make Dogecoin a phenomenon. Elon Musk declared that it was his favorite cryptocurrency, and even allowed the purchase of certain Tesla products with Dogecoins. Today valued at $0.15, it is one of the 10 largest cryptocurrencies in the world in terms of capitalization.
Its unexpected success inspired a large number of similar projects, relying on memes or photos of dogs to create cryptocurrencies with no real purpose or value. All this from an extremely cute dog.
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