Hardly paw-some: Man joins Tinder as a DOG and proves just how challenging online dating can be for women



Joe Veix, 26, was surprised by how his 'matches' changed when he switched from being a male to a female dog

As a 'female dog', he was flooded with lewd and aggressive advances



Tinder matches over five million people per day



San Fransisco-based Joe Veix, 26, joined Tinder as a dog because, as a journalist, he was mildly interested to see how other users would interact with him as a non-human.



Tinder, the hugely successful dating app whereby users are matched simply by swiping through profile photos of people nearby and skipping or approving potential suitors, is known for its unique approach; convenient at best and shallow at worst.



Joining initially as a male golden retriever called Hero and receiving a series of vapid and predictable 'matches' who were clearly very bored, the game changed when Mr Veix switched his gender to female.



Boy meets girl: Journalist Joe Veix joined dating app Tinder to see how well he would do posing as a 26-year-old - in dog years - golden retriever called Hero (pictured)

Mr Veix, who wrote about the experiment for DeathAndTaxes.com, 'approved' every profile he swiped past throughout the test, and received 206 matches in the space of a week as a male dog.

Then, re-entering the cluttered digital dating pool as a female dog, he was surprised to be bombarded with 300 male matches in a mere two hours - at 9.30am on a dreary weekday morning no less.

And while the University of Rochester recently conducted a study which revealed that men are 40 per cent more likely to email a woman than the other way around, no one expected this statistic to hold strong cross-species.



In character: It started off harmlessly enough when Mr Veix was pretending to be a male dog, female Tinder users like Lizze (pictured) with arguably a little too much time on their hands willingly playing along

Canine loving: Golden retrievers are undeniably handsome dogs, certainly so for 'swimmer, traveler and engineer' Stephanie (pictured)

'There were too many matches to keep up,' writes Mr Veix, who tells MailOnline he has tried online dating as himself a few times, but not 'seriously'.



'It became difficult to swipe right at a steady pace, because the “It’s a Match!” screen animation would play after every profile and slow me down.'



Bizarrely, a large number of the chats he received as female dog were 'immediately' sexual he notes.



Things take a turn: When Mr Veix switched from being a male to a female dog, his profile was suddenly flooded with eager, and often aggressive, male Tinder users like Curtis (pictured)

Frequent deeply un-original references to 'doggy style' flooded in. One man, a 31-year-old Wall Street worker (according to his profile) took the time to construct a series of well-worded advances.



'I'd donate a kidney and two from my annoying coworker just to take you on a long hike around Fort Funston,' he writes. 'I'll bring the tennis ball. Deal?'



Several were aggressive or downright rude. Curtis, 23, for example, whose captivating profile summary was: 'Hi how you al doin let me know let me think [sic]', opened his line of communication with the simple phrase, 'Shut up b**ch.'



Steady on: Worryingly, many of the men were entirely unperturbed by the fact they were addressing a dog - so long as she was female, she was a sufficient target for lewd remarks

Scary: For Hero the female dog, Mr Veix writes 'there were too many matches to keep up', from fine gentleman such as Rovert (pictured) who appears to have something of an anger problem

Another somewhat concerning character, whose profile puzzlingly reads: 'I won't freak out if you don't reply back immediately', messaged the canine with: 'Yeah that's right ya mutt bring me the remote' and 'Stop your f**kin barking or the shock collar is coming on [sic].'



And 25-year-old Jon, whose only biographical snippet of information is that he stands at 6 ft 1 tall, offered: 'Oh Hero, if only I weren't all alone and you were a real woman... We're so compatible!' before continuing with, 'Maybe you can try? To be real? For me?'



These responses were in sharp contrast to the messages he received as a male dog, which were far more light-hearted.



Dashing: This Wall Street trader might even be an appealing candidate, but for the fact that he is willingly engaging in a well-worded exchange with a fictional female dog

And then there's plain desperate: Sergio (pictured) was locked in menial conversation with Hero the dog for over an hour, according to Mr Veix, who quickly got fed up and deleted the app

Lizze, 22, joined in the game and engaged in a series of 'woof woof' and '*wags tail*' type exchanges. Stephanie, also 22, flirted using cat emojis, and another spent over an hour chatting inanely and submitting gems such as: '1 bark means yes and 2 barks mean no?'



Mildly amused by playing a male, and quickly fed up of experiencing a taste of the dog-eat-dog world of being a female on Tinder - fictional or otherwise - Mr Veix deleted the app, which claims to match over five million people worldwide every day.



'It does seem like female users have to experience an unfair amount of objectification and casual misogyny'

'I got sick of my phone being overloaded with Tinder notifications and awful messages. Even if you’re a dog, online dating is terrible,' he concludes.

When we asked Mr Veix what he deduced from his ill-fated experiment, he said: 'I'm hesitant to derive too much meaning from pretending to be a golden retriever on a dating site, though it does seem like female users have to experience an unfair amount of objectification and casual misogyny simply by logging in.