A dog owner has vowed to never again speak to his English Bulldog through the security camera in their home after seeing how spooked it left him.
Brian, from Auburn, Massachusetts, says both he and his wife adore their 5-year-old dog Ralphie, describing him as “the love of our lives.”
“He’s an awesome dog,” Brian told Ring. “Extremely smart.”
Ralphie isn’t the only dog to enjoy a privileged position within the family. In 2024, a Talker survey of 2,000 dog parents conducted by the pet food brand The Pets Table found 76 percent of respondents consider their canine to be the “main character” of the family. The poll also revealed that 84 percent of dog parent respondents think of their dog as their child.
Brian certainly has a special attachment to Ralphie. So much so that he decided to install a Ring camera in the house so he could check up on him. Checking in has become a regular habit for this dog-obsessed homeowner. “I use my Ring camera to check on Ralphie when I am working from my home office several times a day,” Brian said.
However, Brian recently made the mistake of not only checking in on Ralphie but also talking to him through the built-in intercom on the device. “I put a Ring camera in front of his water bowl so I could just watch him drink from his water fountain,” Brian said.
One day he took things a little further though. In a video captured on Brian’s Ring camera and subsequently shared with Newsweek, viewers can see the moment Brian interrupted his dog’s enjoyment of the water fountain to say: “Hi Ralphie!”
It should have been a cute moment. Brian was just checking in on his beloved dog and letting him know there was someone looking out for him. Yet to Ralphie, it was a moment of abject terror. For him, the voice would have come out of nowhere. Like some ghost calling out to him. His terrified reaction was understandable in the circumstances.
“As you can see in the video, he gets startled when he hears me calling his name through the Two-Way Talk feature,” Brian acknowledges.
There’s more to it than just being startled. Ralphie appears totally befuddled. He does something akin to a double-take upon hearing the voice.
Brian immediately noticed and later shared his observation that Ralphie “caulked his head to try to figure out where the voice was coming from.”
Though it’s an amusing enough response, Ralphie’s reaction has put Brian off from ever surprising his beloved dog in this way again. “I never spoke to him through the camera again because I don’t want him to be afraid,” he said.
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