The newest employee to charm Reddit’s r/aww has four paws, a crooked tongue and, according to the person who shared his photo, a spot on an Icelandic hospital’s payroll. The picture, posted on November 9 under the title “This cutiepie is a paid staff member at an Icelandic hospital,” had climbed to fifth place on the cute-animal forum by the next afternoon.
The cutiepie is a small, shaggy dog. When one reader guessed Pekingese, the poster answered: “If I remember correctly he’s a Pomeranian and Shih Tzu mix.”
A coworker with a fan club
The poster, who refers to the hospital’s patients as “our patients,” added one line of praise beneath the photo: “He’s a godsend for our patients.” Neither the hospital nor the town was named in the post, and we could not confirm the dog’s pay arrangement independently, so his job title rests on the word of the person who works alongside him.
Readers were happy to take that on trust. One renamed him “Doc Cutie” and called him “clearly a great healer.” Another nominated him for “Employee of the month, every single month,” and a third described him as “the best healthcare worker on the payroll.” Several American commenters joked that the little dog probably had better health insurance, and a higher wage, than they did.
The detail that won the thread was his tongue. Fans called out “the lil blep” and the derpy expression, while one person simply wrote that “this face would cure me of absolutely everything.” Another reader said they had met a dog like him two summers ago and remembered him as “the bestest boy.”
Why hospitals keep animals on staff
A dog on a hospital ward is not a new idea, even if a salaried one is rare. Doctors have used animals to calm and engage patients for more than two centuries, and the practice now has a formal name: animal-assisted therapy.
- 1790s: The York Retreat in England, run by William Tuke, let patients wander grounds stocked with small domestic animals, an early recorded use of animals in mental health care.
- 1860: London’s Bethlem Hospital added animals to its wards to lift patient morale.
- 1919: The US military promoted dogs as a therapeutic aid for psychiatric patients at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC.
- Freud’s consulting room: Sigmund Freud kept his chow, Jofi, in the room during sessions, noticing that patients relaxed when the dog stayed unbothered by what they said.
- 1961: Psychologist Boris Levinson wrote about the human-pet bond after leaving his dog with a nonverbal child and returning to find the child talking to it.
Today, dogs and horses are the most common therapy animals. Reviews of hospital programs report lower anxiety and pain scores in children, calmer moods in dementia care and reduced stress among patients and even healthcare workers. Researchers also flag limits: many studies are small, it is hard to separate the animal’s effect from the extra human attention, and hospital patients with weak immune systems raise real questions about germs. Programs typically screen animals for size, temperament and training before they are allowed near a bed.
A small dog with a big job
That screening is one reason calm, sturdy little dogs are popular for ward visits. They fit on a lap, they can be lifted onto a bed, and a patient who cannot walk to a dog can still reach one. A Pomeranian and Shih Tzu cross, bred from two toy companion breeds, sits right in that niche.
Whether he draws an actual salary or is paid in treats, the comment section had settled on a pay review. “Give him a raise,” one reader wrote. Our own pet coverage has shown dogs doing plenty of unlikely work, from Java the Labrador, who set a Guinness record by pegging laundry on a line to the corgis that sprint across NFL fields at halftime, and history has its own working dog in Sergeant Stubby, the Yale stray who went to France in World War I.
For now, the hospital’s smallest staff member has one confirmed qualification on the record: at least one coworker says he is a godsend.
Further reading
Illustrative image. Image: H.A.W.C 101, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
