Teen Mom 2’s Jenelle and David Defend Dog-Killing Incident: ‘She Had a Lot of Vicious Tendencies’

Jenelle Evans and her husband, David Eason, are defending their dog-killing incident in a new vlog shared on YouTube.

On Monday, August 31, the former Teen Mom 2 star posted a video titled “I Have Something to Say,” the first episode in what she shared would be a docuseries defending her family from allegations of abuse and sharing their side of the story of what went down with Child Protective Services and being let go from MTV. In it, David once again told his side of the story about how he shot and killed one of the family’s pets, a French bulldog named Nugget, in April 2019.

“So, about Nugget …. She was a loving dog to me, but she was not loving toward our kids at all. I mean, I loved the dog. The kids loved it. But she didn’t love the kids,” the 32-year-old said in the video. “She wasn’t always vicious, but she had a lot of vicious tendencies. She really was kind of mean. We put up with it for a long time.”

He claimed that the “dog didn’t play nice,” and they often chose not to share videos of the kids playing outside or riding their bikes in the yard because Nugget could be seen biting their feet and trying to bite the wheels on their bicycle. He claimed that the behavior was so pervasive that the “dog would get hurt really bad [sic]” because she was always running after vehicles, including his ATV and car.

Though he and Jenelle, 28, attempted to “reward” the dog whenever she was “being nice to Ensley” or the other kids, including Jace and Kaiser, he said the dog continued to behave badly. “She bit Ensley on the face more than one time,” he said. “The first time it happened, we should’ve got rid of her. But we had been working with the dog. … It seemed like it was working, and so that was one of the reasons I was taking the video that day that Ensley got bit on the face, was because we never hardly had that many good videos of the kids playing with the dog.”

For the father of three, that was the last straw. “That was not the first time that same day that the dog had done something of that nature,” he said. “Well, I took it upon myself to put the dog down. … I regret it,” he continued. “But sometimes that’s the way it works. I wish it hadn’t have had to happen that way.”

The MTV alum claimed “that’s the way his family has always done it when the dog bites somebody.” He said that it’s normal for their area — and that some people even shoot dogs that wander onto their property. “That’s something I would never do,” he said. “Unless it tried to bite me. I’m [going to] protect myself. I’m [going to] protect my family, too.”

After Jenelle initially denied that David was involved in Nugget’s death, claiming she didn’t know what happened and the dog disappeared, David admitted to “euthanizing” the dog with his gun during a September 2019 interview with PeopleTV. “If you call the authorities at that point, the law says the dog has to be euthanized. … I’m not going to pay anyone to euthanize my dog when I could do it myself,” he said at the time. He’s compared himself to a veterinarian on more than one occasion, and his wife has stood by him when it comes to his decisions about the bulldog.

“David has grown up in the country lifestyle — he hunts, he fishes. The way he was raised is really different than a lot of other places,” she told People. “We understand that people are scared of the whole gun thing, [but] they just don’t understand it from David’s perspective. … His father taught him, ‘Don’t let any animal hurt you’ … and he just thought what he was doing was best.”