Dogs

"Want me to, hmmm, deficate on your rug?"

Every so often, Andrea says that she might like to get a puppy. All I can think is, “are you nuts?” You don’t have challenges enough already that you want an untrained juvenile animal running around your house? You want stains and surprises everywhere? You want holes chewed in your carpet? You want dog hair on all of your clothes? Not to mention the furniture - Cody wetting himself on the dining room chair, as he sometimes does, would be like an expert refurbishment compared to what a dog would do to it.

Never mind that Andrea is – ahem – a clean individual. The kids are – ahem – not. And dogs are – ahem, ahem – really not. Our children making messes creates enough friction. At least they are flesh and blood offspring and some evolutionary emotional restraint kicks in before things get too severe. I’m not sure what would save poor Fido.

I’ll be honest and say that I simply do not understand the desire to get a pet. I have nothing against them, really, but it is simply not a compulsion that I feel. I would no sooner snuggle and hug and kiss and roll around on the floor with a dog than I would a sheep at the petting zoo. As far as I can tell, pets are almost as much work as children without the (for me) emotional reward.

(In case you can’t tell, I’ve softened my statements in the paragraph above. This is because you do not want to get on the wrong side of dog people, who can turn violently insane at rhetoric like that above. So therefore, dog people, I want to take a moment and be perfectly clear: It’s not you, it’s me. It is totally normal and rational to want another species in your house defecating on the floor and destroying your possessions. I obviously have a deep character flaw.)

Here’s our one family experience with pets: One summer, at the church picnic, the kids won two goldfish as prizes from one of the games. My reaction was “oh man, God hates us,” which didn’t take too long to prove true. We found the burden of feeding a goldfish daily and washing the bowl weekly to be too much to bear. Goldfish are normally a short-lived species. This was true for us for one of them, who met his demise within three weeks. For the other, we apparently got the Methuselah of goldfish. 18 months after that church picnic, we were still faithfully scrubbing his bowl each Sunday and counting down the days to his passing.

As the pets get bigger than fish, the commitment only increases. The tank you have to clean gets larger. The weekly scrubbing gets harder. I know people who literally have to schedule vacations around their pets. I just don’t have the time or patience for that nonsense.

Therefore, we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever have another pet in our household so long as I have a say. Which means that, someday, we will have another pet.  Because I don’t really have a say. The world, it turns out, does not function on rationality. Otherwise, Gucci and Hummer and the band One Direction would be out of business. And the species would probably be extinct. Because, let’s face it, having children is about as rational as having a dog. Children don’t tend the farm any more. We don’t need them to fend off saber-tooth tigers. But some of us, the crazy ones, manage to convince ourselves we do need them to help clean the dog doo off the carpet.