Mackenzie McKee, former Teen Mom 3 star and current wackadoodle, got herself into some hot water yesterday after sharing a video of her son kissing a dead dog.
Her son. Kissed. A dead. Dog.
Mackenzie documented the whole thing on Snapchat: her dog had puppies, and one of them didn’t make it. Unfortunately, her five-year-old son, Gannon, didn’t get the memo.
He kept holding and cuddling the puppy after it passed away because he simply didn’t know that it was no longer alive.
Mackenzie lamented that she didn’t know how to tell him about the dog, so she did it in the most tactful way she could think of — she said "Gannon, you know that dog is dead, right?"
Gannon said that yeah, he did know the dog was dead, but he kept holding it. Mackenzie told him they needed to bury the poor puppy, and so he eventually handed it over to his mother.
After he kissed the pup’s nose, of course.
Mackenzie tried to defend the video immediately after sharing it, saying that they did all they could do for the puppy, and that "Gannon is having a hard time saying goodbye to the puppy that didn’t make it."
But surprisingly (just kidding, this isn’t surprising at all, not even the tiniest little bit), the video received some backlash anyway.
So much that now, Mackenzie has done an interview to really set the story straight.
"I brought the dog to the vet in the morning," she explained to Radar of her pregnant dog. "He said she’s too small to deliver the dogs so we have to give her a C-section."
"Gannon is there with me and he’s smart enough to take things in. They bring out the mom and the two puppies."
"They said one might not make it," she continued, "but you can take him home."
So they did take him home, and you know the rest.
After the puppy passed, Mackenzie said that "What was going through my mind was, I had a miscarriage at 14 weeks and I delivered the baby naturally."
"I remember them taking the baby away and I never saw it again. I wish I could go back and hold the baby to get closure."
"It messed me up for a while."
Just when you thought this story couldn’t get any more tragic, right?
She said that Gannon "took the dog to a corner and prayed over it," and "That was a beautiful moment for me because he sees me pray in hard times."
"I had to explain the dog was sick and he got sent to heaven. We had a funeral, made a casket and buried the dog."
She insists that "Gannon is okay, he got closure."
… Nope, still weird.
It’s sweet if Gannon feels better after getting to kiss the puppy goodbye, it really is. And if the dog had just passed, it’s probably fine.
But the way we see it, the issue isn’t so much what happened — though, to be clear, it’s still pretty bizarre — but that Mackenzie felt the need to film it and slap it on social media.
If her kid was that upset about the puppy denying, then he could have probably used a little more comfort right at that moment than his mother could give him with a phone in her hand and Snapchat on the ready.
But yes, it’s great that he got some closure.