A dog owner was shocked to discover her mini bull terrier playing a surprise game of dress-up while she was out of the house.
Saara Rostedt, a fantasy author from Finland, told Newsweek she was on a bus headed to work when she received an alert on her phone from her pet cam.
“I opened the app and I was laughing so hard when I saw what happened,” she said.
Reviewing the security camera footage, she was shocked to see her 3-year-old dog, Tarmo, dressed up like a canine version of Jon Snow from Game of Thrones.
Tarmo the mini bully
The clip, which was subsequently shared to her dog’s TikTok page, tarmotheminibully, shows the dog walking around her apartment with some kind of cushion cover draped over his back.
“He is home alone, casually walking away from the dining table, wearing the stool cushion as a cape,” an onscreen caption explains.
Rostedt was baffled as to how Tarmo ended up looking like this.
“He has not done anything like that before and I do not know how it happened, but when we came home Tarmo was sleeping in his bed with the cushion,” she said.
Science may hold the answer though. It could be the case that Tarmo was missing Rostedt and the cushion cover in question contained her familiar scent.
A 2015 study published in the scientific journal Behavioral Processes highlighted how the canine brain has a positive response to the smell of their owner. That was the conclusion drawn following an experiment in which 12 trained dogs were presented with five different scent smells while undergoing an MRI.
These smells included their own scent, the smell of an unknown dog, that of a canine who lived with them, the smell of an unknown human and the scent of a human they lived with.
While all five scents generated emotional responses in the caudate nucleus, an area of the brain associated with positive expectations, the strongest reactions were generated when smelling scents associated with a familiar human.
This highlighted how dogs were drawn to familiar family fragrance. Tarmo is certainly a character and has been since the day Rostedt and her partner first picked him up from a responsible breeder.
“He has been an absolute joy from the start, I have never met a dog that is so carefree and fine with EVERYTHING,” she said. “He is so unbothered and happy all the time.”
Though she acknowledges he can be “stubborn and wild” from time to time, they enjoy a busy and active life together.
“He loves long walks in nature with us, especially in the clean and pure Finnish forests. He also loves to travel in a car and run with his dog friends—an 11-year-old Spanish waterdog called Nero is his bestie.”
A dog who will “do anything for food,” Tarmo even has something of a track record for being drawn to his owners’ things, which adds more credence to the theory that he is drawn to their scent.
“He always carries our shoes next to his bed, to sleep next to them,” Rostedt explains. “Luckily he does not chew on them.”
Tarmo is certainly drawn to his owners but the feeling is definitely mutual.
“He wants to follow us everywhere and wants to be a part of everything—from folding laundry to having a yoga session with mom,” Rostedt said. “He has always been a, well, clown, and we’ve had so many laughs from his larks.”
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