Woman Starts Cleaning House—What Dog Does in Response Has Everyone in Tears

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Rachael O’Connor is a Newsweek Life & Trends reporter based in Leeds, U.K. Her focus is on reporting trends from across the internet and all corners of the world. Rachael joined Newsweek in 2024 from Metro.co.uk and previously worked for The Irish Post. She is a graduate of the University of Galway. Languages: English, Irish. You can get in touch with Rachael by emailing r.oconnor@newsweek.com.

Rachael O’Connor

Life and Trends Reporter

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The internet’s hearts have melted over a very good dog who helped his owner clean the house without being asked.

Margaret Anne Neal, 28, lives in Jackson, Tennessee, with her 9-year-old dog Koda, who she adopted as a puppy while in college.

“He was found in the road by a sorority sister of mine,” she told Newsweek. “He’d just been abandoned there at only a few weeks old with a broken tail.

“As soon as I saw her Facebook post about needing someone to adopt him, I knew he was my soul dog.”

Since then, Koda and Neal have been through it all together, with her loyal dog by her side as she graduated college and grad school, bought her first home, started a business, and got married.

“I feel like we’ve lived 100 lives together. Every year his face gets a little more grey and it reminds me that even 100 more years would never be enough with him,” she said. “My dad always says ‘Koda is one of the smartest dogs I’ve ever met,’ because he’s truly so human-like.”

Now a video showing one of Koda’s intelligent and adorable moments has gone viral since being posted to Neal’s TikTok account @margaretanneneal on May 25, racking up close to half a million views.

In words over the video, she wrote: “When I tell you my dog is perfect, I mean he saw me cleaning the house and cleaned up all his toys and put them in one place and stood next to them until I noticed.”

The clip showed the older dog lying across Neal’s lap, looking totally relaxed as she massaged his head—a proper reward for cleaning up his toys.

It then panned to the living room, where a pile of his toys could be seen neatly stacked in the middle of the room.

Neal wrote in the caption: “No one can tell me he’s not absolutely perfect in every way.”

And TikTok users agreed, awarding the sweet video more than 140,000 likes, as one commenter sweetly declared: “Everyone thinks they have the best dog and everyone is right.”

“I’m so glad you noticed and had that conscious moment with him,” another said, while another described the video as “the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

Others shared their own stories, one recalling: “My grandma taught her dog to clean up his toys, and one time he came over and I have three dogs and their toys are always all over, and he picked them all up and put them in their toy box.”

But another admitted: “Aww my dog follows behind me ripping cotton out of his toys while I clean.”

Neal told Newsweek Koda had “never” cleaned up his toys like this before, but has always been a “very observant” dog.

“I work from home most days so he is my shadow. I’ll say ‘let’s go to work’ and he knows to run into my office and sit by my desk. Usually with a toy in tow!” she said.

Dogs can process speech quickly, and are good at observing instruction words such as sit, stay, or down—or in Koda’s case, let’s go to work. However, they don’t learn words in the same way as adult humans, but in the same way as babies, which is why dogs only learn a handful of words rather than a big vocabulary, according to a 2020 study by the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.

Neal added about her adored pet: “He’s truly one of the best things in my life. He is a lover boy in every way!”

Do you have funny and adorable videos or pictures of your pet you want to share? Send them to life@newsweek.com with some details about your best friend and they could appear in our Pet of the Week lineup.

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