A couple of weeks ago, I became obsessed with a man known as “Butter Dawg”. He is slim, white, American and has the fluffy hair and grey hoodies of your typical frat bro. In other words, if you squint or scroll past an image of him quickly, he appears totally average. But if you linger, you notice his eyes are staring, sunken, and that he barely blinks. You’ll see that his cheeks are flushed and ruddy, like a medieval lord. Which makes sense if you watch any of Butter Dawg’s TikTok videos, because essentially his whole schtick is a fast track to debilitating gout.
Roughly six months ago, Jack Turco – Butter Dawg’s real, legal name – went viral for his unusual diet, which is made up almost entirely of animal products. In one video titled “Three tips for starting carnivore diet”, which has been viewed over three million times, Turco calmly declares that “if you go straight to a strict carnivore diet you will probably not go to the bathroom for one or two weeks at the beginning. And that’s normal.” This voiceover is layered over a sped-up video of him eating a pile of mince off a wooden chopping board, with a huge lump of butter in the middle for… seasoning, I guess, or maybe intestinal lubrication? This is a running theme in his videos, which usually involve him eating an unholy amount of calories, largely consisting of raw meat wrapped around sticks of butter. Sometimes it’s testicles, sometimes chicken boiled in bath water, and sometimes “pizzle”, aka bull’s penis.
