I’ll be honest — I’m not proud of it, but one of my guilty pleasures is observing the dumpster fire of humanity that is social media. As I scrolled through Facebook this morning, a particularly awful post by a local LA news outlet caught my eye.

It wouldn’t be fair to call this string of words an article, journalism, or anything of the sort. It’s tragedy porn, pure and simple. People love animals, people love tragedy. If it’s cute it leads, and if it bleeds it leads. If it’s cute and it bleeds, people lose their fucking shit.

It wasn’t hard to predict that the comments section of this tragedy porn would be an inferno of depravity the likes of which would leave Dante in awe. Jaded as I’ve become after years of scouring the depths of the internet out of morbid curiosity, the following couple comments still caught me off guard.

When I called the Kirkland Home Store where Erik Trask is an assistant manager to ask if they condemn his statement, the store’s manager, Kara, said that, “there’s nothing we can do if it’s on social media.” Shortly after I hung up, Trask responded to my previous request for comment, saying, “calling my employer? lol that’s cute of you,” and, “I guess you support maniacs stabbing the [sic] their dogs. Pretty disgusting of you.”

He did not answer the original question I asked regarding his statement about gassing mentally ill people.

While there is an open question as to what the consequences should be for making such hateful comments in a public forum, I found it interesting that Kara did not need to reach out to corporate, HR, or anyone else in the company before categorically denying there was anything they could do.

Luckily Kirkland’s has an online customer service form where you can let them know what you think.