In February 2017 the internet decided that pregnant dogs required professional portrait photography, and I have thought about it roughly once a month ever since. The trend had a documented origin, a clear peak, and at least one four-pound participant who understood the assignment considerably better than I did. I am filing this nine years late because that is how long it took me to stop being embarrassed.
The photograph that started it
On February 1, 2017, Beyonce announced on Instagram that she was expecting twins, in an image of herself kneeling in front of a wall of flowers, wearing a veil and not much else. According to NME, the picture broke Instagram's most-liked record at 7.3 million likes, reached 11.1 million by the end of that November, and was named the platform's most liked photo of 2017. NME also noted that the image was parodied widely, which is the polite industry term for what happened next.
What happened next is that people began recreating it in their own gardens, with their own curtains, and then, within two weeks, with their own dogs.
Gwen, February 2017
The first canine entry I can verify belonged to a chihuahua named Gwen. On February 14, 2017, AOL reported on Gwen's Beyonce-themed maternity shoot, which her owner had staged and posted on Twitter. Per AOL's description: a sheer green veil, a floral necklace, a dark red ribbon across the chest, and a backdrop of real garden flowers. AOL also reported that Gwen, like the artist she was answering, was expecting two, with the puppies due that same month. Gwen is a magnificent name for this particular job, and our names file would score it accordingly.
Here is what was never published, and I have looked. Gwen's owner is not named in the coverage I can still verify. No outlet followed up on whether the litter arrived, or when, or how many, or how everyone did afterward. Gwen entered the news cycle extremely pregnant and left it the same way, which is the internet's standard exit interview.
The dog who actually finished the story
The trend outlasted the news cycle. That June, a pregnant dog named Fusee, of Olympia, Washington, received a flower-crown maternity session of her own. HuffPost's account of Fusee's shoot reports that her owner, Elsa Veria-Means, posted the photographs on June 26, 2017, and that Fusee delivered eight puppies two days later, on June 28. Eight. She produced a beginning, a middle, and an eight-part epilogue on a two-day turnaround, which makes her the only fully professional subject in this article.
My own attempt, for the record
I do not have a pregnant dog. I have Nacho, who is male, neutered, four pounds, and has never once used any of that as an excuse. I explained to my wife that I would be producing a homage. She asked a homage to what. I said to the moment. She went to bed.
I bought three yards of sheer fabric, a wire wreath frame, and forty dollars of supermarket carnations, an outlay our pampered-dog economy desk would classify as discretionary and I would classify as a private matter. I built the flower wall against the kitchen door with painter's tape. It held for eleven minutes.
Nacho's documented contributions were as follows. He ate one carnation. He wore the veil for two full seconds and then reversed out of it like a man leaving a wedding early. He sat down in the dead center of the flower wall, which by that point was a flower floor, and looked into the phone with the expression of a dog being asked to explain a charge on the company card.
It is the best photograph I have ever taken of him. It does not resemble Beyonce. It resembles an insurance claim. The wardrobe file holds that a chihuahua will accept a garment whose purpose he can identify, such as warmth, and reject a garment that exists so his owner can join a cultural moment. I have now tested this. It replicates.
The part I am not joking about
Both dogs in this story appear, from everything reported at the time, to have been well looked after, and I want that on the record before the next sentence. A chihuahua pregnancy is a veterinary event and not a content genre. Litters in this breed run small, which our litter-size file gets into properly, and whelping in a very small dog can turn serious quickly. VCA's guidance on whelping in dogs draws the line between watching and calling in plain numbers: hard straining for more than thirty minutes with no puppy, or more than two hours between puppies, means the veterinarian now rather than in a while. Our chihuahua pregnancy guide covers the rest of the timeline. If you found this page because your own dog is in labor at this moment, close it and make the call.
The wreath frame is still in my garage, holding two carnations that have dried to the color of an old envelope. I keep meaning to throw it out and I keep not doing it. What I have worked out in nine years is that the genre was never really about the veil, or the flowers, or the very famous photograph being answered. It was about a person standing in a kitchen making an enormous fuss over a small animal who has no idea she is the subject of anything. Gwen's owner got a beautiful picture out of that arrangement. I got a four-pound dog with a carnation in his mouth, declining to look sorry about it. Both outcomes are backed up in two places.
