Bringing Your Dogs to Inappropriate Places
I love dogs, but what the fuck?
As hobbies for 30-something-year-olds go, caring for a dog is one of the more rewarding and complicated ones. Dogs are fun and cool, but they can also be a bit much and don’t listen to reason and take biohazardous dumps. On paper, my beagle Whiskey is a simple man. He likes long walks on sunny days so he can partake in two of his favorite hobbies: Sniffing things and peeing on things. The ideal state of walking with him depends on a baseline state of chaos, an appropriate balance of spontaneous adventures and freaked-out mania when a new treat enters the vicinity. Overall, he is too pure for this world, so he is mostly well-behaved and his recall is on point, if only because he’s food-motivated and knows deep down who has the goods. But I still have to maintain a vigilant watch over his every move because many other dogs are reactive and poorly socialized, and I’m tryna prevent war on every walk.
Walking around in a large city gives you a front-row seat to some pretty depraved behavior, and one of these involves people picking up their dog shit in a baggie and dropping that baggie in the original location of the dirty deed. I’m not sure why the owner wouldn’t put it in a bin as they have already finished the worst part, and wrapping the turd in a bag makes it last longer and it leaves plastic outdoors. This would be an opportune time in this post to insert that Chloe Sevigny comment about “the athleisure and the dogs are taking over, and that’s really unfortunate.” I love dogs, but I hate most dog owners and the way their incompetence and poor training skills make other people hate dogs. There is nothing more cringe than imposing your domesticated beast on an unsuspecting public, especially if it’s medium or large. There’s a British TV show called It’s Me or the Dog, where owners take their pets to a behavioral school to rectify their behavior, and the scenario reveals that in the majority of cases, the owners are the culprits and enablers of their dog’s bad behavior. Some are so passive, they’ll let the dogs do whatever they want. It is truly disturbing to think this could carry over if they have children.
People have gotten way too comfortable bringing their dogs anywhere. Any coffee shop at any point could turn into a Westminster Dog Show situation. Leashes are tangled with other leashes, dogs are lunging at strangers, large pitbulls are jumping into their owner’s lap while they sit at a tiny bistro table, hyperactive collies are knocking over plates and glasses and pissing an ocean onto the floor and the staff has to clean up the mess while the owner clicks away on their laptop. They’re bumping into you and saying, “Sorry, this is Millie. She’s a rescue! We got her during the pandemic.” It’s obvious you got her during the pandemic, because she’s trying to hump every other dog in here. I’m just trying to send a couple of emails—now I’m in an Eyes Wide Shut situation for Poodles.
And, for the record, none of what I am saying applies to service dogs. I’m talking about straight-up unemployed dogs. Though it is kind of crazy how anyone can say they get nervous when they have to send their boss an email, so they get a yappy chihuahua that they can fly with for the rest of their life—but that’s another story. Anyways, I’m curious to know if the uptick in dogs in public has any correlation to the increase in people living in apartments and not having a fenced-in yard for the dog to run around in while they’re out running errands. This could speak to some broader issues in urban planning in regards to prioritizing 15-minute neighborhoods and public parks. Maybe it also has something to do with dog ownership becoming an all-encompassing affair, functioning as a substitute for raising a child. People will conflate leaving their dog at home with something that ranges from low-grade neglect to an unforgivable crime.
I was in middle school when George W. Bush was president, and it never made sense to me when people would say “you become more conservative as you age” because it was unfathomable to me that I’d suddenly stop believing in evolution or using the Bible to justify homophobia. Now I realize the way you become more conservative is when you see a dog in a produce aisle or jumping onto pre-made food displays and you think, something is fucked up here… I am futilely pushing back against the inevitable passage of time, and now I am a relic of a forgotten past.
Why does your giant Labrador need to go into a Uniqlo with you? That dog wants to be playing in a large grassy park, not dragged along on your retail expedition or by your side as you get piss drunk on $25 espresso martinis. I am most concerned about restaurants, because these places are anarchist war-zones when it comes to their pet policies, and no one has any idea which ones are dog-friendly and which ones aren’t.
There should be a universal napkin rule:
If a restaurant uses cloth napkins: No dogs allowed.
If a restaurant uses paper napkins: Probably dogs allowed.
If a restaurant uses no napkins: You can bring an iguana or anything at that point.
If a restaurant uses paper towels: You’re at your ex’s apartment.
Also, everything I just wrote is applicable if you replace “dogs” with “kids.”
hahah "unemployed dogs" XD maybe it's the lack of backyards, but also maybe it's the lack of human offspring.