Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin posted a photo of her 6-year old son Trig standing atop a dog to reach the kitchen sink and people started to get divisive.

She added a seemingly blithe yet up beat text: "May 2015 see every stumbling block turned into a stepping stone on the path forward.”

There were nearly 70,000 responses liking Palin’s New Years’s day post, and the comments were all over the map.

You had some people saying that, regardless of their politics, standing on a pooch was just wrong, and you had some who thought that the animal would have simply moved if it had at all been hurt.

Then PETA weighed in.

The president of the animal rights group, Ingrid Newkirk, issued a response Saturday, as reported by the Oregonian: "PETA simply believes that people shouldn't step on dogs, and judging by the reaction that we've seen to Sarah Palin's Instagram photo, we're far from alone in that belief."

Palin, who this year launched her own network, used the opportunity to make some quasi incendiary remarks about President Obama’s supposed affection for dog meat as well PETA’s hypocrisy for not chiding a similar child on dog picture posted by their 2009 woman of the year Ellen DeGeneres.

And she seemed to joke about the whole business by saying:

“Dear PETA,
"Chill. At least Trig didn’t eat the dog.”

The Christian Science Monitor sees that all this fuss perhaps means “the trend lines in society suggest that Palin's simple photos have at least tweaked a chord in a changing society.”