It would be better if it just represented replies as ASCII chars to avoid perl postprocessing. Most terminals probably doesn't display colored emoji anyway.
wd() { dig +short txt $1.example.wd.ip.wtf | head -n1 | perl -pe's/"//g;s/\\226\\172\\156/ /g;s/\\240\\159\\159\\168/chr(255)/eg;s/\\240\\159\\159\\169/chr(223)/eg' | perl -pe'$_&=lc("'$1'")'; }