I haven’t gone much for the “millennials are the worst generation” schtick, but this is just about as infuriating of a story as you can imagine.
Millennials are returning their “pandemic dogs” to shelters in droves, causing a dog genocide brought on by the most vapid, selfish, uninteresting class of narcissists this country has ever seen.
You’d be blind if you didn’t see this coming. What was a rare positive story to come out of the pandemic turned out to be as heartwarming as 20 nurses and doctors making TikTok videos while grandma suffocated on a ventilator behind the door they were twerking on.
Millennials are finally realizing that dogs are actual living breathing things that require some attention and that you’re actually gonna have to go home between work and happy hour to feed your dog and give it attention. That dog loved you unconditionally, even though you stuck it in a 700-square foot apartment and let it yelp and whine all day. Maybe they took it on a couple of walks a day when they weren’t going on about their student loans on Twitter. This is how you repaid your dog. Sent back to the shelter to be incinerated in a furnace with dozens of other hastily orphaned former living purses.
I grew up with rescue dogs. I currently have a rescue dog. The love you feel from them day in and day out is something you couldn’t imagine living without. You watch their broken hearts slowly heal into fiercely loyal and trusting souls and above anything else, they love you harder than you ever thought possible. The only problem is that it takes hard work and patience to get to that point.
In Austin and other at-one-time-or-another-interesting millennial strongholds, bars will be full of milquetoast tech bros who are, for whatever reason, making an 80-pound lab sit on a patio in 95-degree heat while “dad” drinks seven ranch waters and talks about his app idea he’s been pitching for six years in the hopes that someone will suck him off even though he’s been doing it himself for the past three hours while his dogs internal organs start to melt.
So, it’s no wonder that pandemic dog owners who declared themselves guardian angels of shelter dogs threw them to the curb once they got the Instagram clout they sought was gone, replaced photos of the dog with black square and shallow minimalist quotes about racial justice and their vaccine card, took down their “we’re all in this together” Facebook cover photo, returned to the office and called it a day. The only virtue left to signal was returning the living, breathing thing they had taken into their home and take it back to the wretched place they found it where it would surely become someone else’s problem or just cease to exist altogether. The LARP was over. Back to normal. The dog was no longer socially convenient to them.
So, now Emma and Becky and Justin and Tyler are going to have to look in the mirror and realize that they’re exactly where they were a little over the year ago: a boring, sad cliche of a young adult who continually runs away from responsibility and at one point in their life, decided developing a personality just wasn’t all that important.
I get it. You wanted a dog so you could get railed by the 28-year-old middle manager at the dog park because you tricked them into being interesting with your living accessory. Congratulations. You did it.
And to those people who are sticking it out with their imperfect dogs, I see you. Give that boy or girl a big ol’ belly rub for me.
Please consider adopting from or donating to these KC area pet shelters:
Great Plains SPCA
Humane Society of Greater Kansas City
KC Pet Project
Wayside Waifs
Kansas Humane Society
Beauties and Beasts
If there are other shelters you would like people to know about, drop them in the comments.