I often say “All the wrong people have kids and all the wrong people have dogs.” While that's mostly a cantankerous joke that I like to make about how irritating some people are … well, it's also kind of true, and a recent dog-related dust-up on TikTok is a perfect example of why.
A woman's dog peed on frozen food at Trader Joe's, and she's being called out on TikTok.
I love dogs — I like them better than people in fact! But it is a simple fact of dog ownership that you must take responsibility to make sure the literal wild animal in your care is not going to cause a nuisance — or worse — when you bring it around others.
That seems to have escaped Harper, a TikToker who posted what she seems to have thought was a funny video about her dog causing a literal hazardous waste situation in a Trader Joe's. She's since deleted it, presumably due to the backlash, but it has been reposted by others, as seen below
In the video, Harper described how she took her small dog Hamilton grocery shopping with her to Trader Joe's and put him in the cart because he's “cute like a little baby.”
What she clearly did not account for was him behaving much like a baby and peeing indiscriminately while she shopped — all over the fish sticks in the frozen food case.
Photo: smrm1977 / Shutterstock
Her video left people on TikTok furious, many calling her out as an irresponsible dog owner.
What people seemed to find really galling was the way Harper seemed to find this whole disgusting debacle hilarious — including the reactions of the slack-jawed staff members who then had to clean up her dog's urine, which she said “filled” the freezer case.
“I am dead serious when I say there is an epidemic of entitled dog owners who do not understand how much of a public nuisance they are,” TikToker @meatymollie said in a video in which she reposted clips of the dog owner's story.
“Like, this girl was responsible for creating a biohazardous situation at a grocery store for allowing her dog to pee all over the food,” she continued. “But she also comes on to TikTok and jokes about it like it's some quirky funny situation we could all find ourselves in.”
Others pointed out that she was making things harder for people with disabilities who need service dogs.
“Stop. Bringing. Your. Untrained. Pets. Into. Places. They. Shouldn't. [expletive]. Be!” TikToker @herdandheal said in response to the woman's video.
As a handler of service dogs and someone who uses a medical alert dog herself, she found the video particularly galling, especially since she says ill-behaved dogs in public often cause problems for service dogs.
“People ask me all the time, why can't pets just go everywhere with us? This is the [expletive] reason,” she said in her video.
“If … my medical alert service dog … is not actively being barked at, attacked or something else by a random pet in a store where it's not supposed to be,” she went on to say, “then it's literally this [stuff] where, like, pet owners are just letting their dogs essentially run free in a [expletive] store and do whatever they want, like pee on 40 bags of fish sticks!”
Another TikToker summed the issue up perfectly, saying that dog owners need to “understand what [their dogs] can and can't do.” Using herself as an example, she explained that her dog's nickname is “literally Demon” because of his misbehavior, and she takes that into account when taking him places.
The bottom line is that your dog doesn't have a right to public places if you haven't put in the time and effort to make sure they can do so safely and without causing problems for others. And that should go without saying.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
