May 13, 2014

I was feeling bored and lonely, so I joined Tinder as a dog. I set up my profile as a 26-year-old golden retriever named Hero, a male dog who was looking for both men and women within a 100-mile radius.

For those unfamiliar with Tinder, it's a dating app popular mainly for its immediacy and simplicity. It presents photos of someone nearby, along with a short profile. If you like them, you swipe right; if you don't, you swipe left. If you both swipe right, you're matched, and you can chat with each other to arrange a date.

Whenever I had a free moment I'd swipe right on every profile. I got matches almost immediately. If they messaged me, I'd bark at them.

 

A lot of people played along.

Others fed me cliche pickup lines.

A few people responded by pretending to be a dog. (Though I'm not sure if this is how they normally behave while dating.)

Surprisingly, only one guy was annoyed with me.

Only a few got sexual.

This poor guy talked to me for over an hour.

After four days as a male dog, I had 206 matches—154 guys and 52 girls. Not bad for a dog with no job or interests.

I switched Hero to a female dog, looking for men and women. Even though it was only 9am on a weekday morning, I was immediately barraged with responses. After roughly two hours—during which my phone vibrated almost nonstop with notifications—I had 300 male matches, and one female match.

I got my first chat within a minute of switching to female.

 

There were too many matches to keep up. It became difficult to swipe right at a steady pace, because the "It's a Match!" screen animation would play after every profile and slow me down. If I were able to swipe right quicker, I estimate my number of matches would have doubled.

A large number of the chats were immediately sexual. A lot of straight men wanted to fuck this dog.

Others were smarmy as hell.

In lieu of a "hello," a lot of guys just called me a bitch.

Or got really violent.

 

Or were painfully desperate.

I stopped being a female dog after a day, and deleted the app. I got sick of my phone being overloaded with Tinder notifications and awful messages. Even if you're a dog, online dating is terrible.