Finland’s national broadcaster has stumbled onto the least demanding hit on television: a camera pointed at a dog and her six puppies, running all day and all night.
Yle calls the stream Pentulive, Finnish for Puppy Live. This year’s star is Hilkka, a five-year-old Lagotto Romagnolo who gave birth to two females and four males on October 10. The puppies stay on camera until they leave for new homes in December. Last year the page pulled 6.5 million views in a country of 5.66 million people.
Mostly it is a pile of sleeping puppies
Puppies sleep up to 20 hours a day, so the honest description of Pentulive is a warm heap of fur breathing. Yle calls it slow TV, a format Norway tried in 2009 with a seven-hour train journey. Viewers are promised the milestones anyway: eyes opening, first wobbly steps, first playtime outdoors. The litter gets official names on Saturday, picked by sniffing sealed envelopes.
What this means for your dog
Yle science reporter Pirjo Koskinen started the series in 2021 to show what happens during a dog’s first weeks. She told CNN that time at the breeder shapes the rest of a dog’s life, much as early childhood does for people.
Worth holding onto if you are shopping for a puppy this fall. Ask what the litter heard, walked on and met before eight weeks: vacuum cleaners, car rides, stairs, children, other dogs. A breeder who answers in specifics is showing you the work.
For everyone else, the stream is a reminder that a puppy’s first job is sleeping. If the first months are harder than the photos suggested, one in three families say raising a puppy was harder than expected.
You can watch the litter grow up at CNN’s report on Pentulive.