I joined a Subreddit that shares my extremely unpopular opinion. I’m not sure it was a good idea.
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Let’s just get this out of the way: I don’t like dogs. I don’t like the way they smell. I don’t like the way they jump on your dry-clean-only pants. I especially don’t like the way they “get to know you.” (I generally don’t like to be poked down there unless it’s so someone can tell me whether I have HPV.) I don’t believe animals are equal to people; I can’t believe $15,000 pet surgeries exist in a country where not every person can get health care.
I’ve long kept this feeling to myself, because in America, saying you don’t like dogs is like saying you think the Taliban has some good ideas. Recently, however, I learned about a community of people just like me: The Dogfree Subreddit. I don’t use Reddit much, but immediately, I was taken by r/Dogfree’s tagline: “We don’t like dogs.” I had never before seen this, my most taboo opinion, written out so plainly.
That first day on the site, I couldn’t stop reading posts, which are mostly news reports of dog bites, complaints about seeing dogs in public, and gripes about sidewalk poop, barking, and other dog-related externalities. One post is titled, “The fact they breathe with their mouths open and tongues hanging is enough for me to want nothing to do with them.” As I read my same unpopular views, reflected back by other people, I was overcome by the thrill of being truly known, by the unmistakable gasp of catharsis.
Read: What do dogs know about us?
The Subreddit’s FAQ includes a response to a frequent assumption that, surely, our problem is with unruly dogs and their oblivious owners. “Though it might be a tough pill to swallow,” the moderators respond, “we in this sub simply don’t like dogs.”
A few bad experiences crystallized my lifelong disdain. On top of not liking dogs, I’m allergic to them. When I was 9, I had to be picked up from a friend’s slumber party after her dachshund crawled across my pillow and my eyes swelled shut. I still remember the indignity of having to call my parents, the thick stupor brought on by extra-strength Benadryl, the painful wheezing as I ran my face under the tap at 2 a.m. It was my introduction to the fact that it’s a dog’s world and I’m just living in it.
Other times, I’ve had scary run-ins with dogs that were trying to “protect” their owners. In grad school, my boyfriend’s roommate had a pit bull that would terrorize me whenever I went over while the roommate stood back and laughed. “He’s friendly!” he’d say dismissively. (The Dogfree people hate when dog owners say this.) When we first moved into our house, our neighbor’s enormous dog, apparently confusing us for intruders, bounded into our yard and ran straight at me, barking wildly. I screamed an expletive. The neighbor did nothing. This is probably why I never bothered to meet those neighbors.
None of these encounters, of course, were particularly dangerous. But they cemented an impression that dogs are at best gross, and at worst threatening. More recently, I was with a group of people that included a pediatric reconstructive plastic surgeon. She told us about her job mending the faces of kids who have been in horrible accidents, and someone asked her, “Seeing what you see in your profession, what’s one thing you would never do?” “Get a pit bull,” she said quietly.
But this kind of thing just doesn’t trouble most people. The majority of Americans own a pet, and dogs are the most popular pet choice. Americans are more attached to their dogs than they are to their cats or other animals: Most dog owners say the dog is as much a part of their family as a human family member. If forced to choose, 39 percent of Americans would rather save their closest pet from death than one human person. I may not understand this bond, but I know I can’t argue with it. All of this leads to a lot of pent-up anti-dog sentiment, which I was happy to off-gas on r/Dogfree.
At last, a place to discuss the revulsion of seeing a “dog blanket” on someone’s couch, which you’re expected to sit on even though it’s covered in hair and god knows what else. Or your outrage over an incident in which a dog attacked a 6-year-old girl. Or the extreme strangeness of the fact that owning a dog requires you, the human, to scoop the poop of them, the animal, into little bags, which many humans then leave scattered around everywhere. When I read Dogfree, I think, I’m right to hate dogs.
According to a 2019 unscientific survey of 2,000 people who claimed to be members, Dogfree’s 56,000 Redditors are 57 percent female and mostly live in North America. They were drawn to the Subreddit because they feel socially pressured to like dogs, or don’t appreciate when people prioritize dogs over people, among other reasons. A lot of them, though, just simply have never liked dogs. Most aren’t allergic, but most are afraid of at least certain kinds of dogs. And it’s not an anti-animal Subreddit: Less than a quarter are totally pet-free and plan to remain that way; lots of members express a desire to care for a cat.
From the September 2021 issue: Why so many Millennials are obsessed with dogs
One user, GemstoneWriter, a 19-year-old who has been a member for about nine months, thinks dogs are loud and dirty, but she tries to think of dog owners as “lost, rather than enemies,” she told me over Reddit chat. (She agreed to be identified only by her Reddit handle.) She doesn’t like how some people elevate dogs to nearly the status of human children. Still, she doesn’t admit to many people that she dislikes dogs, and Dogfree makes her feel less alone. When someone’s attacked by a dog, she likes how people in the Subreddit empathize with the victim instead of defending the dog or owner.
Emma Allum, a 41-year-old member in Southeast England, gets unnerved when big dogs veer toward her or stare at her. “I don’t like it when they lick me,” she told me, “and when you’re just walking along, minding your own business, and some big dog shouts in your ear from behind the garden fence.” During our Zoom call, it felt uncanny to hear this thought coming from someone else. When a dog licks me, all I can think about is how soon I can take a shower.
Allum’s fear of dogs sharpened over a series of jarring incidents, such as when one dog tried to sniff her baby son while he sat in his stroller and when another charged at her in a field. But dogs are popular in her area, so if you’re afraid of dogs, “you are made to feel like a bit of a plonker,” she said. Not so on the Subreddit. There are no plonkers there.
The Subreddit is an example of a “negativity friendship”—a community of people united by something they don’t like. (In politics, negative partisanship is a similar phenomenon.) Several studies—which remarkably did not involve me as a participant—have found that hating the same person brings people closer together than liking the same person does. We seem to appreciate the risk the other person took in revealing something so unsavory; if we share the unsavory view, all the better. In a world where pretty much everyone likes travel and hiking and coffee, your tribe comprises those who hate what you hate. “Because of the potential social repercussions and relative rarity of revealing negative attitudes, perceivers view negative attitudes as especially informative,” one such study finds.
In fact, the more I perused r/Dogfree, the more I found I disliked dogs—and the less I could see any other point of view. The forum kept reminding me of new ways dogs are disgusting. I’m not normally paranoid about dog bites, but Dogfree makes maulings seem widespread. Dog owners aren’t allowed to post in the Subreddit, so we never get a sense of, say, how owners would prefer to be told that we don’t want to pet their dog. Though I’m sure no dog lovers will be friends with me after this story anyway, it seems like simultaneously staying active in the Subreddit and remaining close with a doting dog parent would be difficult. At one point, I was apparently reading so much anti-dog propaganda that my phone’s hidden algorithms took note and TikTok served me a video about a woman whose top lip was ripped off by a pit bull. We know what you like, it seemed to say. You like to hate on dogs.
After a while, I started to question whether this was actually healthy. Some of the posts on the Subreddit seemed like they were stoking fear and rage rather than offering support. Is it really that bad to see a dog with its head sticking out of a car? Do dogs really not belong in nature? Is it truly that annoying when a dog looks at you?
The Subreddit is also an example of an echo chamber, but whether echo chambers are harmful, per se, is unclear. From studies of partisan political news, researchers have concluded that not only are very few people actually members of echo chambers; seeing mostly one-sided news doesn’t appear to radicalize people as much as we may fear. In studies of people who spent months consuming partisan news, “people’s views did not become more extreme and people did not become more hostile toward the other side,” Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor at UC Davis who has studied online polarization, told me.
Read: Reddit gave its moderators freedom—and power
The moderators of the Subreddit didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, but in a post in which they urged members not to talk with reporters, they essentially agreed with this analysis: “We’re accused on an almost-daily basis of being an ‘echo chamber,’ but we don’t find that to be an inaccurate or even unfavorable perception of us; perhaps it’s an echo chamber, but it’s the only one we have.”
Nevertheless, I started to feel like this whole thing might be a giant yucking of a yum, a slam book we were compiling on the rest of the school. The Subreddit doesn’t allow posts about animal abuse, but I was a little taken aback by the attitude of one user, who chatted me: “I fuckin hate dogs, wish they’d die out as a species, and my dream job would be head euthanizer at the pound.” Yeesh.
I wouldn’t want to own a dog myself, but I generally believe that people have a right to do what makes them happy, as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else. The dog owners who can manage that should be left in peace! I occasionally felt bad participating in the disparagement of animals that didn’t get a say in whether they became pets, are only obeying their natural instincts, and, after all, can’t even read.
Allum told me that although, on the whole, she finds the Subreddit validating, she’s careful not to get too sucked in. She skips some of the articles about dog bites, figuring they won’t do anything to help with her fear. Lots of people on the Subreddit hate dogs, but Allum doesn’t. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay, this person has said this, but I don’t actually hate dogs,’” she told me.
This is the problem we all face online: the tricky balance of joining in without losing ourselves. It’s being religious without becoming a zealot, sharing without one-upping, not letting your stated beliefs outrun your actual opinions. Life inside the echo chamber is cozy, but also cacophonous.
I still think I will visit Dogfree occasionally, and I still think it’s a good place for people to talk about their fear of dogs—a stigmatized and poorly understood phobia. I still wish I didn’t have to interact with dogs as often as I do.
But I will probably find a wider group of Subreddits to follow. After all, the site offers plenty of options. For example, I don’t like cats, either.
