Pet fishing is the dating app red flag more and more people are starting to notice
A new dating deception is spreading across apps, and it involves borrowed pets, performed personalities, and a growing gap between who people pretend to be online and who they actually are.
Dating apps have created a whole new vocabulary online, and a new term is making the rounds: pet fishing. You already know about catfishing: using fake photos or a false identity to attract dates. Pet fishing is the newer version, and it is catching a lot of people off guard. Instead of faking their own appearance, pet fishers use photos of someone else’s dog or cat to make their profile look warmer, more likable, and more dateable. Sometimes it is a friend’s pet borrowed for a weekend photo. Sometimes it is a stranger’s animal pulled from social media. And sometimes it is simply claiming to love pets when the person has never owned one.
A dog or a cat in a profile photo signals emotional availability, responsibility, and a gentler side that people find genuinely attractive. Pet fishers know this, and they use it deliberately.
What pet fishing actually looks like
The behavior ranges from mildly misleading to fully deceptive. On the softer end, someone includes a single photo with a friend’s dog and lets people assume it is theirs. On the harder end, they build an entire persona around pet ownership, talk about their “cat,” share stories about walks with their “dog,” and only come clean after the relationship has started to feel real.
Pet fishing is a red flag because the behavior reveals how a person approaches honesty from the very first swipe. Someone willing to build a false impression before you have even spoken is telling you something about how they handle the truth when it is inconvenient.
Why online dating is getting harder to trust, and what to do about it
Pet fishing is a symptom of something larger happening across dating apps. Online dating has always involved some degree of performance: putting your best photos forward, leading with your most appealing traits. But the distance between curated and fake has been collapsing, and AI is making it worse.
AI-generated profile photos are now common, and major apps have introduced detection tools to catch them. AI-written bios make it harder to know whether the words in a profile reflect a real person or a language model optimized for matches. Borrowed pets, borrowed lifestyles, and borrowed personalities are all part of the same pattern: the person on the screen is increasingly a constructed version of someone, built to attract rather than to connect.
The practical result is that real compatibility is harder to assess before a first date than ever before. You can spend weeks texting someone, but then discover in the first ten minutes of sitting across from them that almost nothing is true and real about them. The warmth, the humor, the lifestyle, the pet, all of it was carefully managed from behind a screen.
This is why many recommend going back to offline dating. Real-world meetings, whether through friends, shared activities, work, gyms, or just your neighborhood, give you access to things no dating profile can fake. How someone treats a stranger. Whether they actually laugh or just type “lol.” How they behave when they are not performing. Those details aren’t available in apps, and they are often the ones that matter most when figuring out whether someone is actually worth your time.
Online dating is not going away, and it genuinely does connect people who would never have crossed paths otherwise. But treating it as a starting point rather than a destination, using it to get to a real meeting as fast as possible rather than building an entire relationship through a screen, is the approach that cuts through the performance layer the quickest. Pet fishing, AI photos, and polished bios lose most of their power the moment two people are actually in the same room.
