For years, Domenic Biagini has been capturing awe-inspiring videos of whales and sharing them with the world on his TikTok. Most people will never get to see whales as up close and personal as Biagini does, but watching his TikToks are the next best thing.
Recently, though, Biagini decided that he wanted someone very special to him to get to experience the whales firsthand — his Lab, Fin.
The day Biagini and his co-captain, Erica Sackrison, took Fin out on their boat, there were around 50 blue whales in the area. They turned their boat’s engine off and just floated quietly, waiting for a whale to show up.
As soon as Fin saw the whale’s back break the surface, he stood up and stared right at the huge animal, seemingly transfixed. After watching the whale breathe out of their blowhole, he even turned around and looked back at his dad, as if to check if what he was seeing was real.
“[The] dog is like, ‘Are you guys seeing this?!’” one commenter wrote.
Blue whales, weighing in at around 300,000 pounds, are the largest animals who have ever existed on Earth. Labs, on the other hand, tend to weigh around 60 pounds. That means that blue whales weigh about 5,000 times as much as a Lab. One would imagine that it would be very difficult for any dog to wrap their mind around such an enormous being.
People in Biagini’s comments were having fun imagining what was going through Fin’s head in that moment.
“This has got to be so confusing for a dog,” one commenter wrote.
Some people were worried that Fin was going to get too excited and try to join the whale in the water. In fact, Fin has actually tried something similar in the past.
“The first time I took Fin on the boat was when he was a puppy, and he promptly sprinted to the front of the boat and jumped off into the bay,” Biagini wrote on Instagram.
This time, though, Biagini and Sackrison were extra careful. They held on tight to Fin’s harness while he looked at the whale and kept him secured to the boat with two leashes and bungee cords.
While it’s hard to know exactly what Fin was thinking as he watched the blue whale, one thing is certain: He experienced something that very few other dogs have gotten to do.
“I bet in all existence, dogs were not able to see this,” one commenter wrote.