So, let me just get this out there right away. I am NOT a dog person. Or a cat person, or an any other sort of animal person. Verily, I declare unto thee: I have no patience for anything (other than a baby human) getting its hair and saliva all over me gratuitously. Hair-and-saliva-sharing score negative points on my love languages chart. My favorite thing about animals is looking at them, because they are really adorable and cute, from a distance. They are even more adorable and cute from this side of a computer screen. Thank you, YouTube.
I suppose if I had grown up with indoor pets I wouldn't have animal-tolerance issues. According to Brewer Family Legend, my mother declared to my father from the very start: "It's either me or the dogs!" And that is the story of how any dogs we ever owned lived exclusively outside.
I remember one time we returned home from somewhere to find a dog -an actual, live dog- IN our house. Just, you know, hanging out. It was a surreal sight for us kids, in our strictly pet-free home. For my mom, it was also surreal, like a nightmare come to life. Son, you better believe that animal knew her wrath. It flew panic-stricken back into the wild and never dared to return. (I seem to remember a broom being involved in this scene, but I could be mistaken.) How that animal got into our house we will never know. That unsolved mystery also went down in Brewer Family Legend.
Another reason I am not a big fan of dogs is because dogs like to eat really disgusting stuff, like poop. Ugh. Ga-ROSS. Of course, people excuse them because they "don't know any better" and blahblahblah, and I agree. They don't know any better. However, my personal preference is to not be licked by or even be accidentally in danger of being licked by anything that doesn't know not to eat it's own poop. I also hate yelling loudly at things not to eat poop. It's just not ladylike, and I have suspicions that the neighbors find it uncouth.
Dog's don't stop at poop though. They're like goats. Once I went outside only to find our dog in the act of eating a sock. It wasn't a small, wimpy, kid-size sock either, oh no. It was a thick, wool, man sock, of the tube variety. "NO!" I shouted, running toward him. "Mezzie, stop! No eating socks!!!" But at that precise second the twelfth inch of that thick, woolen sock disappeared down the creature's gullet. Ewwwww! Until that moment I had taken with a grain of salt Mom's despairing claim every laundry day that all the socks in our house must get eaten by someone.
There have been indoor dogs at the last two homes in which I've worked. I guess you could say I have been learning to tolerate dogs, with all their licking and their hair-shedding and their barking during the baby's nap time. (<--- At which point I confess to temporarily harboring an irrational rage towards the whole canine species.) But, *deep breath*... tolerance. At times, it is a very ungracious tolerance. Every time I find a dog hair in my food I remind myself that purgatory on Earth is much more preferable to doing time after death. Every time I find a dog hair in the baby's diaper I console myself that his immune system is becoming so potent that any invading diseases will wither to a crisp upon impact. Every time I come home looking like the business end of a feather-duster I remember that I'm a first-world citizen and have 24-hour free access to a change of clothes and a washing machine. But mostly, I just remember that home is a dog-free zone and that makes me quite happy.
By this time, most dog owners/lovers/rights-activists probably think I'm a dog-hater, but that's definitely not so. There are things I love about dogs, like their puppies. #SOCUTE!!!! Puppies are awesome and I can never get enough of them when our dog has a litter. That said, I enjoy them OUTSIDE, where they can do their business in places that I don't have to clean up afterward. I also enjoy the serene presence of a dog lounging beside me while I read or watch T.V. Not licking me, or being overly demonstrative, but companionably laying-beside, kind of like a space heater that you can stroke in a friendly sort of way every once in a while. (That last one begins and ends my list of things I enjoy about dogs being indoors.)
It's worth it to state here that the point of this post isn't really anything. I just wanted to say funny things about dogs in order to come to better terms with my conscience, which feels guilty about not sufficiently liking the cute, slobbery, furry balls of friendliness which are fondly referred to as "man's best friend." Oh well. At least I tolerate them. :)
