A dad who underestimated the power of the Internet will be forced to buy his kids a puppy after they met his seemingly insurmountable challenge.
Ryan Cordell told his daughters they could get a puppy if they got a million likes on Facebook — little did he know that they would become the darlings of the Internet and call his bluff with room to spare.
Within a few hours, an adorable post on their twogirlsandapuppy Facebook page garnered more than a million likes (it’s now over 1.5 million). Now the Boston-area family is in search of a great rescue puppy.
Talking with Good Morning America, Mr. Cordell said that his two daughters and three sons wanted a puppy ever since their last pet died of cancer in August. The kids got the Facebook idea from the Urbano family in Massachusetts, who were allowed to get a cat after receiving 10,000 likes on Facebook.
After the girls presented the idea to their father, Mr. Cordell jokingly replied that they could get a puppy when he saw a million likes. He didn’t realize that puppy lovers are such a powerful lobby and that users would reply en masse to the picture of the kids holding a sign, which read: “Hi World – We want a puppy! Our dad said we could get one if we get one million likes! So LIKE this!”
On a sidenote, they wrote: “He doesn’t think we can do it!”
By midnight Tuesday, the post received a whopping 10,000 likes, and it went viral from there.
The mother, Evie, told GMA that the reason the the kids got this huge response was due to their father, who works with social media. “My husband works with social media as part of his job, so it got spread through his friends that have large social network and it just took off from there.”
The kids were surprised with the good news on Wednesday morning. Mr. Cordell described his youngest daughter’s reaction as “overly ambitious.”
Earlier today, Mrs. Cordell wrote on the Facebook page, “Mom here — we are researching various rescue groups in our area. We are definitely rescuing not buying. We don’t want to make the wrong decision, so give us a little bit of time.”