GUILLOTINE: Dog ownership is creepy

by Evie Power | June 19, 2025

 

Dogs are eroding the fabric of modern society. 

 

 

Well, not intentionally. But they are everywhere

 

 

You’ll bump into an acquaintance in the bar, make small talk, get chatting. You’ll assume that you are enjoying the company of another ordinary, right-minded individual; you’ll laugh, let your guard down, feel safe. 

 

 

Like a stupid fucking idiot. 

 

 

Because then you’ll see it. A notification on their phone, an email from a tutor, a message from a friend, whatever. You don’t care. What you care about is the homescreen. Previous, more illustrious generations built altars for the things they worshipped, painted murals, planted gardens, wrote hymns. The modern locus of reverence is smaller, less tangible; it is bound into the four glowing walls of the iphone lockscreen. The image on your dormant iphone is no longer a place-holder, but a declaration of intent, a tiny, pixelated manifesto of care. The iPhone lockscreen speaks to the character of its owner, to their love for their friends or their family or their partner. 

 

 

Or their horrible inbred dog. 

 

 

The iPhone lockscreen remains, to this day, the major presiding symptom of dog ownership. It is the avenue through which you are to discover that your supposed ‘friend’ is sick, and wrong, and not like you. It comes in a moment, the chime of a text. Their screen lights up, aglow with connection, and information, and an image of the ugliest dog in the world. 

 

 

You know the sort of thing. It is wearing a party hat, or a halloween costume. It’s going to have an uncomfortably human-adjacent name, like Lucy or Myles or Otto. Its face is locked in a wild grimace that, looked at sideways with a hefty enough dose of delusion, could possibly be taken for a smile. Every feature is a flail of discomfort; if phrenology was still a valid medical practice, you would be well within your rights to read its bugging eyes and turned up nose as the genetic encoding of the message, please fucking kill me right now. 

 

 

The sight may well fill you with questions; uncertainty is common after a traumatic event. What is that thing? Is it even alive? Is it capable of dying? If so, can we kill it?

 

 

From experience, seeking answers for these questions is wildly inadvisable. In the modern political climate you are more likely to be publicly condemned for disliking dogs than for supporting ethnic cleansing (Not that I’ve ever tried out the latter). 

 

 

Because the adoration of dogs is a non-partisan issue. It’s like picking your nose, or cyberbullying children on Reddit. Everyone does it. The dogowning masses assume their devotion to be apolitical, universal, and they do not take kindly to the implication that it is not. Any free thinker brave enough to speak against the dog-dogma will learn, the hard way, that the Divine Right of Kings did not die with Charles I; it merely found a new idol. The same political and religious fervour that put Guy Fawkes’ head on a spike now works to crucify those who dare to oppose modern day dog-worship. 

 

 

This is, of course, not the only way that modern dog owners treat their horrible dogs like royalty; dogs now have their own bathrobes, bedrooms, tax brackets, all of which are leagues above yours. The things are pampered like little Habsburg princes. Which is unsurprising, given their genetic makeup. 

 

 

The fact that it is so impossible, so strikingly taboo, to point out the strangeness of modern day dog culture only works to exacerbate the potency of its societal poison. Because it is weird. 

 

 

Objectively. 

 

 

It should not be controversial to think it strange that, all of a sudden, everyone has a pampered, horrifyingly inbred animal living in their home. It is even stranger that these animals are beyond reproach, that they are treated just like people and respected more than them. 

 

 

Because the dog in society is not just a dog anymore. Or, at least, not to most people. Domestic dogs are not only animals, but interpersonal cure-alls. They serve as quasi-children, or best friends, or boyfriends. It is weird, therefore, that a dog is a thing you can buy, or have. A dog can’t set boundaries, or tell you to fuck off. It can’t scowl, or speak. It grins, inanely, with its little, sharp teeth, with the blank and animal stare of a predator who has nothing to left to hunt but dry food packets and chew toys. 

 

 

Because dogs aren’t people. They’re not like you, with your office job and your half-price Itsu, your instagram reels and your days spent inside. They aren’t chewing your bedroom to pieces because they are misbehaving, or malicious, or untrained. They are animals, and they are bored. 

 

 

And there is nothing wrong with dogs, as an animal. It is not their fault that they have been co-opted into modern discourse as the multi-relational cure to loneliness, the perfect brother-father-son that you can own and control and tell what to do. I think having a readily available pool of thoughtlessly affectionate animals, who you can buy at a shop, is probably a bit weird.

 

 

So the problem, really, is with the owners.  

 

 

Some opinions feel dangerous to voice; you share a controversial thought, and the wolves are at your door, with their bright eyes and sharp, ravenous teeth. 

 

 

But this is not one of those cases. The wolves have been selectively bred into chihuahuas; their heads are tiny. Their teeth would break before they could bite you. 

 

 

Now all they do is yap.∎

 

Words by Evie Power. Photo courtesy A Scott via Flickr.