A YouTuber and fitness influencer said her husband shot her dog instead of taking him to the vet after a vehicle hit him
- Brittany Dawn uploaded a YouTube clip saying her husband shot her dog after it was hit by a vehicle.
- Twitter users have criticized Dawn for letting her husband shoot the dog without taking it to a vet.
- Dawn has faced backlash in the past over her nutrition and fitness guides.
A YouTuber and fitness influencer said her husband shot her dog after the pet was hit by a vehicle in the street.
Brittany Dawn is a 30-year-old social media star with 250,000 subscribers on YouTube, where she's been uploading storytime and vlog-style videos about weight loss, fitness, and diet plans since 2016.
She posted a six-and-a-half minute video titled "my heart is shattered… my dog died in a hit and run… " to her channel on Wednesday. The clip has almost 30,000 views. Dawn disabled the ability for viewers to like or dislike the video and turned off comments.
In the video, Dawn said she and her husband, Jordan Nelson, who is not an influencer but features on Dawn's Instagram and YouTube pages, found her dog Brodie lying on their street after they returned from doing errands. She said that as soon as she noticed he wasn't moving on the ground, she jumped out of Nelson's car and ran toward the dog.
Dawn said that although she worked as a veterinarian technician for five years, she could not bear to see her pet in that state. She said the dog was still breathing even though he got "hit so hard" by a vehicle.
"I wish I could unsee what I had to see… nothing prepares you for having to see your dog like that," she said in the video, where she appears distraught and crying. "I just collapsed."
She said her husband brought her into their home, where she stayed while he shot the injured dog.
"I knew what was about to happen… all I heard was his truck rev its engine so loud," she said. "That's when the gunshot went off and poor Jordan had to do that for Brodie so that he wouldn't suffer. There was no saving him, it was so bad."
Dawn has also shared two posts about Brodie on her Instagram page, @realbrittanydawn, where she posts snapshots of her religious lifestyle and has over 432,000 followers.
"My whole world flipped upside down tonight," she wrote on Wednesday in the first post, which has over 26,000 likes. "This is the hardest post I've ever had to make and I'm doing it crying in Jordan's arms."
Although the comments on her Instagram posts appear to be mostly positive, Dawn has received criticism for not taking the dog to the vet.
One user tweeted that they cannot "even fathom" how Dawn let Nelson shoot the dog "instead of taking it to the vet."
-Makoto Kino (@kdubz0rs) October 14, 2021
Another Twitter user wrote that they couldn't believe that Dawn made a video the same day that her dog died and monetized it.
Dawn has faced significant backlash in the past for other incidents. In 2019, some followers criticized her for allegedly promoting fitness and eating regimens with hashtags like "#SkipDinner," reported Heavy. She does not appear to have addressed this criticism.
She was also accused of selling generic fitness coaching sessions and nutrition guides while trying to pass them off as bespoke, Insider reported. She apologized to people who felt they had been miseld in a now-deleted YouTube video, according to Insider, saying that she was overwhelmed by her quick success because she had no business background.
Dawn did not respond to a request for comment.
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