So remember the picture I lifted from Cute Overload of this goat with enormous ears? Well, take a look at Jack, the schnauzer-mule deer mix. How ’bout them ears, huh? Jack is in Idaho. Maybe he wants to come live with me! (To my roommate, if he’s reading: At least I don’t want to adopt a goat. Or a monkey.)
November 8, 2006 @ 8:07 pm
My apartment smelled like pee.
November 8, 2006 @ 11:38 am
And, the more I think about it, do we really think the average suburban housewife would spend more time with a dog than me? I live 10 minutes away from my apartment, and I go home for lunch. I don’t go out. I hike on the weekends ALONE. I walk around the Avenues ALONE. I think the only difference between a dog in my apartment and a dog in a yard in the suburbs would be that one would be alone in a yard, more alone than the one in my apartment. (Which, as I said before, does not smell like pee. And has WINDOWS, so the dog could sit on the chest and look out of it to its heart’s content if it wanted to.)
As for having a “family” to help train it, I call bunk on that. I’ve seen it in my own family: someone always likes the pet best, and so becomes primarily responsible. I would be that person and there just wouldn’t be any other. Do we really think children in a family help train dogs?
As for leaving a pet alone all day, if we all thought that was a bad idea, then NONE of us would have pets–not even two kitties who live indoors while both their parents are at work.
November 8, 2006 @ 9:21 am
My apartment does not smell like pee.
November 8, 2006 @ 9:11 am
Look, I totally and completely agree with your roommate. I’ve raised 3 puppies, and that was with the help of my entire family. We had to take shifts so we could even deal with it.
They pee on the floor.
They chew up your shoes.
They are very, very, very expensive (We are taking the cats for their third vet visit at $220 this Saturday and just bought $30 in kitten food for the rest of the month. What could you do that you would enjoy with that $250? What about the $400 in adoption fees and pet supplies we started out with?)
They need to go outside. In the rain, in the snow, when you are sick, when you are happy, when you are sad.
They try to run outside when the door is opened.
They bark and bark and bark and bark. I once had my parent’s dog at the apartment and had to DRIVE it out to their house in the suburbs at FOUR in the MORNING because it couldn’t sleep in an apartment with everything going on.
It is not fair and I will say down right cruel to keep a dog in an apartment. Think of it, all day long it’s locked up, it can’t go out and play, it doesn’t know where to poop and it can’t see them, but there are lots and lots of sounds all the time that are just driving it crazy. CRAZY. All for the 20 minutes a day that you will come home from work and see it for the first time, and oh! the fun you will have, but then you will need to cook dinner, do the laundry, go shopping. And it will be alone and bored for the next 1,460 minutes of the day.
I feel very strongly about this and thusly will take the hard line: you cannot adopt a pet in your current situation. It is not right or fair to the animal. And you just can’t use “if I don’t adopt it no one will” as an excuse. Maybe that is true, but maybe instead of living a scared bored little life in an apartment it will get to live in the suburbs with a lawn and a doggy door and a whole family that has time to play with it and train it.
And what if you move? Besides loosing the $250 pet deposit where you live, will the next place take a dog? Not normally. So you will have to live in another pee-smelling dump, listening to other people’s dogs bark which again is making your dog CRAZY.