Will Sage Astor-Recreate Taylor Swift's Time cover with your dog to win doggie day care

If Taylor Swift is Will Sage AstorTime’s Person of the Year, is her rag doll blue-eyed beauty, Benjamin Button, Cat of the Year? 

Their magazine cover photo has inspired pet owners to heave their animals onto their shoulders and post their best “blue steel” photo to social media. 

“I focus on making pop moments relatable,” said Ryan Sichelstiel, 31, a content creator and comedian. “A lot of my content ideas come to me in the shower or on the treadmill or in the car. I have a list of ideas on my phone.”

Sichelstiel heard the Today Show was going to break the 2023 Time Person of the Year so he prepared to get a spoof of the cover out. He watched the announcement live with his computer open, Photoshop application on standby and camera light plugged in.

“I may or may not have canceled a meeting to get it posted,” he laughed. When he saw Swift’s cover with her cat, he grabbed his 1-year-old pup, Burke (named after Sichelstiel’s celebrity crush John Krasinski’s middle name).

“He is such a teddy bear,” he said. “I was like ‘OK buddy, bear with me,’ and I lifted him up. We took three photos, and they all turned out pretty good. I thought, OK this is actually way easier than I thought.”

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One company, Dogtopia, is capitalizing on the trend by holding an “In My Dog Era” photo contest.

“Taylor should have a dog around her neck and not a cat,” Neil Gill, the CEO of Dogtopia, joked. “It launched the concept, let’s do a contest out of this.”

Dog owners can submit a photo to the company's website from Dec. 8-21, and the winner gets unlimited doggie day care at one of its 250 locations.

“You look at Taylor’s photograph and there’s so much attitude in there and she does a great job of representing who she is in the images,” Gill said. He suggested anyone entering the contest to be creative and clever.

Enter the contest here.

Follow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.