On Monday, May 4, the couple uploaded a YouTube video explaining they had to make the painful decision to put down their healthy nine-year old bull terrier dog, they shared that that there had been “multiple instances” over the years where they would have been justified in putting the dog down, but the final decision was made after he bit their young son, Logan.
“It happened in a way that almost doesn’t matter, because the end result was the same, but in the spirit of telling the story, it wasn’t like Bowser attacked Logan. Logan tried to take food from him,” Nikki explained in the video.
The couple said they had considered rehoming Bowser, but were told by “the humane society” that that “was not an option.” However, The Humane Society of the United States and the Nashville Humane Association told TODAY they had no records of Dan and Nikki Phillippi, and were not aware of and conversations about euthanizing Bowser.
Backlash to the video and to social media posts about their decision came quickly. People were not happy at all about putting Bowser down, and on top of that, creating content about the topic. Users were particularly disgusted about a photoshoot they did and posted on Instagram with their dog before putting him down.
One person wrote, in part, “On today’s episode of influencers are the real pandemic…@NikkiPhillippi puts down her dog for biting her kid but not before she has a photoshoot with the dog inches away from the kid the dog allegedly bit and needs to be put down for.”
The Phillippis have set their Instagram accounts to private, and comments were disabled on the YouTube video, also there’s a petition going around Twitter to demonetize Nikki Phillippi’s YouTube channel and has reached nearly 25,000 signatures in just a few days.
What do you think about this situation?
Text by: José Robledo
Cover photo is a fragment of the video uploaded by the couple via YouTube
