dog parasite

Twiiter / @sdutIdeas

This ‘dogs are parasites’ argument is not going over well on Twitter

Has this guy ever even met a dog?

 

Stacey Ritzen

Internet Culture

Posted on Jul 12, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 11:18 am CDT

It’s a commonly accepted notion that dogs are man’s best friend. Except … [extremely Rob Low in The Grinder voice] what if they weren’t? That’s the argument being made by a columnist in a article for the San Diego Union-Tribune. Author Chris Reed starts out by lamenting the current state of dog ownership culture, which sees people spending more than ever ($69.5 billion in 2017 alone) to lavish luxury goods, spa treatments, and even cosmetic surgery on their fur babies.

He goes on to site a book nearly two decades old (somewhat ominously) titled The Truth About Dogs, published by Stephen Budiansky in 2000, which claims that since being domesticated as wolves, our canine companions have simply been playing the long con because, as he puts it: “mooching off people beat fighting it out in the wild.”

“Millions of years of wolf evolution have selected such behaviors because they are socially effective; thousands of years of dog evolution have fine-tuned such behaviors so that they are socially effective on people,” Reed cites from Budiansky’s book. “Just as we are genetically programmed to seek signs of love and loyalty, dogs are genetically programmed to exploit this foible of ours.”

To what should come as a surprise to literally no one, Reed’s article, uh, didn’t go over well on Twitter—a place where doggos are typically celebrated and not compared to disease-causing worms and protozoa.

And some of the responses were downright savage.

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1017393997822783488

A lot of people also had the same (albeit funny) joke to make:

https://twitter.com/LuminousNumino1/status/1017247373569941505

Dictionary.com once again got in on the action to ridicule the hot take:

Philadelphia’s Morris Animal Refuge fired shots back by pulling a counter-troll on the Union-Tribune:

At the very least, the author predicted the forthcoming outrage when his article first entered the Twitterverse yesterday.

Eight minutes was probably being too kind.

Share this article
*First Published: Jul 12, 2018, 2:20 pm CDT