Google doesn’t let mountains or oceans get in the way of mapping the world and it seems it won’t stop at animals, either.
Images from a Street View car in Chile show what appears to be one of its camera-bearing vehicles running over a dog and leaving it for dead.
If you take a trip down Meza Bell 2815 in Chile on Google Maps, you can relive the moment, shot by shot, when a little canine trots in front of the oncoming car — the next images seen from the car’s rear-facing camera show it lying on the road not moving.
If you follow the Google car’s path and look back as far as the zoom will let you, at no point does the pooch hop back to its feet. Closer inspection of the more immediate images do show the dog moving in one image, but it’s hard to tell whether this is a last struggle for life or he is just lying in the sun and having a stretch.
A person can be seen at the side of the road where the “accident” occurred, but they didn’t rush to the rescue — perhaps a sign that the dog was in no danger? Or perhaps it’s another local who is used to the many stray street dogs in the area and this is not an unusual occurrence.
This sort of thing also isn’t unusual for Google. In January last year, it was accused of running over a donkey in Botswana after images on Street View show the donkey walking alongside the vehicle one moment, then lying still on the ground the next. It was swiftly proven by Google that this wasn’t a hit-and-run and that the images were not as they appear.
Google has said it is investigating the images regarding the dog to “understand and inform what happened” and reassure they “have guidelines in place to protect people and animals” as they map places around the world.
To us, it looks like the dog has simply chosen a paw place to have a lie-down.