I’ll take a crack at “why many of us hate dogs AND their owners”. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but bear with me;

Imagine a food that you think is really gross. It doesn’t even have to be your most hated food! Just one that grosses you out and you’d REALLY prefer not eat it or smell it.

Now, it’s not the food’s fault that you don’t like it. It’s not your fault you don’t like the food. Food, like animals, kinda just is what it is. It’s neutral.

But imagine that this food is everywhere. Every time you visit a friend, they try to give you some of this food, even if you’re not visiting for a meal. They laugh at you when you try to eat a little, just to be polite, and it makes you gag. When you go into the grocery store, to the park, on a hike... there are always people there with that food. They are always trying to get you to eat it, talk about it, look at pictures of it.

When you say “No thanks, I’d rather not.” They think you’re EVIL. They think you’re mean and rude. What kind of person doesn’t like this food? Everyone likes it! People literally treat you differently if they find out you aren’t a fan of this food.

There are memes all over the internet about how this food is literally more important than human beings. They used to be jokes, but now many people really believe that. There are Reddit threads with tens of thousands of upvotes and titles like “People of Reddit who found out their partner hates (food), how did your partner react when you broke up with them?” It’s normal for someone to say that, if their house were on fire, they’d save their (food) instead of their spouse. Nobody bats an eye if you say that! Horrible, right?

Eventually, after many years of this... the mere sight or thought of that food would probably start to irritate you, right? Of course all the people trying to push it on you would make you angry! But after being inundated with that food you hate for so long, I almost guarantee that you’d fervently wish to never even hear the NAME of it again.

And, I think, that’s how many of us feel about dogs.