Kyle Chayka has written an amaze piece for The Verge on the online and real-life origins of the doge meme. The Shiba Inu of doge fame is an eight-year-old dog named Kabosu who was adopted by a Japanese kindergarten teacher named Atsuko Sato when a puppy mill shut down. Sato first shared the now-infamous photo on her blog on February 23rd, 2010, and the doge meme in its current form first began on the Tumblr blog Shiba Confessions, founded in September 2012.
