Brooke Houts’ animal abuse breaks the ‘perfect’ YouTuber illusion – yet our kids are still fooled

As a parent in the summer holidays, there are certain activities that you’ll let your children do for nine hours straight without feeling compelled to intervene, and others that you simply won’t. Reading books? How edifying! Making art? Very creative! Swingball? An unmistakable cry for help, but at least they’ll be getting their vitamin D. Mixed feelings.

On the flipside, television is a big no-no almost irrespective of what they’re watching. “It’s rotting your brain!”, you’ll cry instinctively, as they reluctantly drag themselves away from a five-part BBC4 series on the history of ceramics. And as technology embeds itself ever further into our homes, computers and smartphones have inherited the TV’s traditional aura of mindlessness.

I’m not sure what it is about children engaging with technology – and screens especially – that makes us think it’s only a matter of time before we find them listlessly flailing on the couch with liquefied brain matter dribbling out of their nostrils. Let’s face it, when I was a kid, I spent many a Saturday night in front of the telly watching families trying to memorise ordinary household items on a conveyor belt, or a middle-aged comedian chasing voluptuous women around a tree – entertainments that, in hindsight, look so fatally tedious that it’s a wonder any of us survived into adulthood. And yet, here I am.

Nevertheless, there is something in me that sees my son with headphones on, face buried in an iPad, that means I cannot let it lie.

Of course, a part of it is the fear of not knowing what he’s doing or who he’s doing it with. At one point, my son had the initiative to sit me down and formally invite me into his world, specifically to play Minecraft. It did put my mind at ease, and it was even fun: harmless, but not mindless or uncreative or even particularly antisocial. His childhood isn’t one that I recognise from my own, but given how much of mine was taken up exclusively with bashing the Z and X keys on our ZX Spectrum, perhaps I shouldn’t mind if he wants to aim a little higher.

What does concern me is the pressure that he and my daughter might feel to seek recognition and approval on social media. There is now an enormous cohort of young people who live their lives out on YouTube or Instagram for the consumption of friends and strangers alike. The most successful are worth millions, but for every Logan Paul or Pewdiepie – who, whatever your opinions of them as people, are both hugely popular – there are thousands of would-be internet personalities scrabbling around in an attempt to find a gap in the market.

One such YouTuber is a young LA-based woman called Brooke Houts, who has kept her 300,000 subscribers amused with videos on an array of topics from Tinder to tampons to true crime, most recently uploading a short series centred around a beautiful Doberman puppy who she’d called Sphinx. This week, the wheels came off in fairly repellent fashion, as Houts accidentally uploaded an unedited version of a video that showed her hitting Sphinx, shoving him, and spitting on him. Neither of them appeared to be living anything close to their best lives, and although Houts has since tried to quell the outrage with a long and self-serving statement, LAPD’s Animal Cruelty Unit is rightly investigating.

Evidently, Brooke Houts should never have had that dog in the first place. She lacks the temperament, the maturity, and perhaps the support to be a responsible and loving dog owner. And yet because she wanted to put across a certain image, she got herself a playful, naughty, living and breathing dog, and then she took her frustrations out on it when she thought no one would know.

I’d like to think that hers is an extreme case, but I have to wonder how many harmful decisions are being made in the course of so many millions of adolescent attempts to construct an attractive persona for public consumption without having a discernable skill, and then sell that persona to other young people who are spending so much time watching other people live their lives that they may be failing to develop the skills to navigate and enjoy their own.

It’s a battle pointing out to the very young that Instagram superstars like Kylie Jenner (recently named as the youngest ever self-made billionaire) often have had lip fillers and various other cosmetic enhancements, have filters and lighting and airbrushing to look the way they do online.

But it’s not just about unrealistic aesthetics anymore. Brooke Houts’ abuse of her dog has brought home the fact that lifestyle and personality can be manufactured to look “perfect” too. Horrible as it was seeing this woman with clear anger issues hitting her dog, I’m hoping the widespread condemnation and disgust will bring an understanding that the lives of YouTubers create a world of illusion and in edits are as artificially enhanced as Kylie Jenner’s pout.