The phrase is usually “an elephant never forgets,” but it looks like this rings true for dogs too—as one dog has been praised online for continuing to terrorize his owner’s ex-partner two years after their split.
In a viral TikTok video posted by Madelyn Grace Muse (@username12478193), her dog can be seen sprinting across the lawn and chasing a delivery van.
While this isn’t an unusual scene—as many dogs tend to humor passing vehicles—it’s the driver that has caught the internet’s attention, gathering 2.2 million views.
The text layered over the video explains: “My parents house is on my ex’s route and our 10-pound evil ankle biting dog has not given him a single day of peace in almost [two] years.”
This hilarious ritual, captioned: “If you see this I’m sorry I totally don’t give him treats for it,” has 409,300 likes at the time of writing.
“My mom forgives, I on the other hand,” said one comment with over 60,000 likes.
Muse responded: “He could tournament him for 15 years and we still wouldn’t be even.”
“Your dog is your ride or die,” praised one user, and another wrote: “That dog will forever hold the grudge!!!!!”
Do Dogs Have Memories Like Humans? A Surprising Experiment
A stock image of a dog barking along the road and green grass.
Анатолий Тушенцов/iStock / Getty Images Plus
You may be wondering if it’s a coincidence, or if the dog really knows who is driving the van. According to research, there’s a high chance he does.
A study from the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, suggests dogs have episodic-like memory.
Scientists have been trying to figure out if animals, like dogs, can remember things the way humans do—especially memories of specific events that happened in the past, without knowing they’d be tested on it later. This type of memory is called episodic memory—like remembering what you had for lunch yesterday or a surprise someone gave you last week.
To test this in dogs, researchers used a clever training method. First, they taught dogs to copy human actions on command—for example, if a person waved, the dog would also wave (or do something similar). Once the dogs got good at copying, the researchers added a twist.
Instead of asking the dogs to copy the action they had just seen, the dogs were told to simply lie down. This made the dogs think that lying down was the new goal—not copying.
Then, the surprise: sometimes, instead of telling the dog to lie down, the researchers suddenly asked them to copy the action they had seen earlier, even though the dog didn’t expect to be tested on it. They did this after a short break (1 minute) and a long one (1 hour).
The result? The dogs remembered and copied the actions, even after an hour—although they were a bit less accurate after the longer break. This shows dogs can remember things they didn’t know they’d need to remember—a lot like humans do with episodic memory.
Newsweek reached out to @username12478193 for comment via TikTok. We could not verify the details of the case.
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