Dog Days

I firmly believe people shouldn’t have pets unless they are willing to responsibly own them. For me, that includes feeding, housing, grooming, and nurturing them properly--walking them in the rain, resisting the urge to beat the sam hill out of them when they destroy stuff, even providing expensive medical care if necessary. Since pet owners are required to do these things, and they take great amounts of effort and exorbitant funds, I rarely have pets. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been involved with other people’s pets. Not hardly. I seem to universally attract people who have a thing for animals, especially dogs. My brother Todd once smuggled a tiny puppy onto an airplane flight in a shoe box so he could take it home with him. My kids once bonded so completely with some stray-dog puppies born in my bedroom closet that I woke up with my bed full of children and bar-of-soap sized dogs tangled in a big, snoring pile. My grandparents had a miniature poodle (possibly the nastiest of all dog temperments) which looked adorable in hair bows, but was a vicious whirling dervish of teeth to anyone but my grandmother. And it is a running joke between my brothers and I that, if there are multiple lives, we want to come back in the next one as our mother’s dog--talk about a cushy gig. In Dav Pilkey’s Dogzilla, a giant Corgi terrorizes the mouse town with his stinky breath. Reason number two I don’t have pets.

http://www.amazon.com/Dogzilla-Dav-Pilkey/dp/0152239456

http://www.pilkey.com/