Ozzy the four-month-old goldendoodle isn’t normally allowed on the sofa. But today he has been granted special privileges because I’ve come round specifically to watch TV with him. We’re not watching Paw Patrol, Scooby-Doo, or even Crufts.
We’re watching Sealook, the Netflix kids’ cartoon about a colony of seals that dogs and cats online are supposedly obsessed with. But is this really a thing? A gang of wide-eyed pastel-coloured seals are in a slapstick scrape.
There’s no dialogue: they mostly lie around on the ice, and try to annoy each other by doing silly things like making funny noises, throwing snowballs or keeping each other awake. Ozzy seems more interested in chewing his pizzle stick – which I discover, slightly too late, is the dried penis of a bull. Then again, perhaps this is just canine second-screening: Sealook on the telly, bull penis in the mouth.
Ozzy may be playing hard to impress, but he’s in the minority. Search #sealook and there are loads of dogs pawing at the TV and cats batting at the characters. Benny, nearly one, and five-month-old Myrtle, certainly seem to be converts, judging by their reaction to watching a group of animated seals banging on the ice.
Even when an episode ends and flashes up a yellow bar saying ‘fin’, that still keeps his attention.” Švepsė, a one-and-a-half-year-old rescue cat in Lithuania, is already a TV fan, enjoying animal documentaries and having previously been fascinated by a Lithuanian strongman competition. But Sealook produced an even stronger reaction. Sometimes, she simply sat there watching very carefully without taking her eyes off the screen,” says owner Erika.
We tried again later and he sat and watched a couple of episodes.” The clip helped take Rio’s Instagram following from about 115 to nearly 4,000. This, I tell Ozzy, is exactly the sort of behaviour that could help boost his own Instagram following of 137. Watching television is a far better party trick than barking at his own reflection or stealing hair scrunchies from his human mum.
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