America Is Turning into a Nation of Puppy Fetishists

There will have been 10 — TEN — puppy bowls on Animal Planet after this year’s Puppy Bowl X, a spectacle of unabashed puppy objectification, is in the books. Last year’s Puppy Bowl attracted 12.4 million viewers, and proved itself to be a reliable alternative televised event for people who don’t want to watch the Super Bowl, and though watching puppies gambol about a playpen littered with new toys sounds wholesome, our nation’s growing culture of puppy worship raises some serious questions.

First of all: Isn’t it kind of weird for grown adults to watch more than 60 juvenile animals run in circles for two hours? There’s nothing wrong with it — the puppies seem to enjoy themselves and money gets donated to shelters or whatever. That’s objectively good, positive stuff. It’s certainly better than the Super Bowl’s byproducts, which are, in order: rampant consumerism, rampant consumerism, annoying bandwagon fans, and concussions.

But still. Think about what another form of intelligent, articulate, self-conscious life would say if it observed people watching the Puppy Bowl. If aliens just showed up at a Puppy Bowl party at someone’s house and walked in on a circle of grown-ass humans mouth breathing in front of the Puppy Bowl, saying things like, “OH GOD IT’S SO CUTE I WANT TO PUT ITS EARS IN MY MOUTH!” those aliens would be pretty creeped out. They’d return home and tell horror stories about their Earth visit: “You have no idea — they do this thing where they make baby animals run around for hours and they watch on their vision rectangles while dipping corn triangles into bowls avocado paste and tomato leavings. It is literally a nightmare.”

This year’s Puppy Bowl will see a 30 percent rise in ad revenue. The kittens still perform like clowns during a halftime show, and guinea pigs are still, in 2014, not allowed to compete at all — they have to watch from the blimp. Meanwhile, the puppies, insensible to the politics of their own sport, are being treated like tiny, fuzzy commodities whose boundless energy can be harnessed to generate sweet American advertising revenue. Maybe we should ask ourselves if we’re getting a little too into puppies. Maybe our fascination with puppies is becoming an addiction to puppies, something that BIG PUPPY will no doubt exploit in the future when all human contact sports have been banned and the only sports entertainment option is the Puppy Bowl.

Maybe we need to say, “No” to puppies. Starting right this very moment, take a stand against puppy exploitation: