Woman asks dog “who did that?” after yard discovery—response goes viral

Try not to laugh as this owner confronts her canine, who is suspected of digging a hole in her garden.

The TikTok footage, recorded by owner Alice Wood (@alice.wood95), shows the moment she discovered the ditch near her car. She can be heard sarcastically asking, “Who did that?”

Wood doesn’t have to do much investigating, as her dog proudly sits nearby, wagging her tail with guilt written all over her face. She even expects belly rubs as she rolls onto her back, patiently waiting for praise. This comical scene has racked up more than 16.7 million views in just 24 hours at the time of writing. The April 7 clip has accumulated more than 3.7 million likes and over 12,000 comments.

One user said: “Guilty dogs are the best.” But the real question is, can dogs feel emotions like guilt? In short, the answer is no.

“Dogs don’t feel guilt—they are not emotionally complex enough to feel guilt,” Karis Nafte, a dog behavior expert with 25 years of experience, told Newsweek. “However, dogs will appear submissive—which looks a lot like guilt to us people—when they can see we are upset.

“For example, let’s say there is a toddler and a dog left alone in the kitchen, and the toddler spills a jug of juice all over the floor,” Nafte said. “If mom comes in and starts shouting about the mess, the dog will appear just as ‘guilty’ as they would if they had chewed up a pillow or something—even though they had nothing to do with the mess. It is the anger from the human that will elicit the response from the dog, not the mess itself.”

Nafte added: “The submissive behavior—looking away, appearing to be shy, avoiding eye contact, yawning, trying to hide, rolling on their backs—are all ways a dog says they are scared and don’t want to be hurt.”

Nafte, the owner of Who Keeps the Dog, Pet Mediation, a pet custody mediation company, reiterated that dogs don’t feel guilt—but they definitely feel fear, “especially when their owners are obviously angry,” she said.

This has been backed by a 2009 study led by Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, which found that dogs showed guilty body language more often when scolded, regardless of whether they had misbehaved—indicating their reactions are more about human interaction than an understanding of wrongdoing.