“Jackass” star Bam Margera apologized Tuesday for tweeting a photo of himself holding a fake gun up to his puppy and threatening to shoot it after animal rights groups condemned the picture.

Margera, 33, took the photo Oct. 4 with another person holding up the message, “If she poops one more time she goes bye byes,” which angered groups such as the Chester County (Pa.) Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The caption for the photo reads, “Penny pooped in my bed. Not too fond of that. If it happens again, Penny goes Bye Byes!”

Rich Britton, spokesman for the Chester County SCPA, said the “Jackass” star was “not funny” and “missed the mark on this one.” Britton said the county has had a spike of incidences of animal cruelty, making Margera’s comments more troubling.

Margera, who lives in West Chester, Pa., apologized for the tweet and photo in an interview Tuesday with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Margera said he was unaware of the rampant animal abuse in Chester County and said he wouldn’t have tweeted the photo of his 8-year-old pit bull puppy Penny if he had known about the situation.

“I think those people need to go down,” the 33-year-old “Jackass” star told the Inquirer, referring to people who abuse animals. “Just hurting another animal is rude, crude and more.”

Although he apologized, Margera said his fans know him well enough to know that he was joking.

“I feel like every follower I have on Twitter knows my ‘Jackass’ joking kind of humor,” he said.

The photo of Margera pointing a gun at the puppy’s head is not the only such picture posted on his Twitter account, where he has more than 825,000 followers.

Margera has numerous pictures of himself pointing the gun at friends – all of them warning that they will go “bye byes!” if they don’t stop doing something that annoys him.

Aside from Penny, Margera is also the owner of six cats: Eric the Cat; Trouble; Mischief; Wall Crawl; Peaches; and Tanda Newton Harris, according to the Inquirer.

The “Jackass” star’s girlfriend, Nikkia Boyd, said Margera is more fond of the felines, telling E! that he’s “the crazy cat person.”

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