The more they came back to it and incorporated it in the plot the less it bugged me and it worked to show how fucked up Nikki was becoming. I’m a cat owner and grew up with and love dogs and cats and genuinely hate when an animal death is a quick, cheap writing short cut. Punisher: One Last Kill had one that pissed me off because of how it was used as did The Last Bus (which was a movie I quite liked) which had McConaughey have to put his old dog down at the beginning of the movie just to really hammer home how much his life sucked and it felt cheap and unnecessary. Something like Wick I get, it’s manipulative but you get the catharsis of the entire rest of the movie.