Living in the dog house: When pets rule the roost

Now look, if you’d told me that it was possible to be any more embarrassed by the fact that my family owns and deeply loves a dog, while I’m simply forced to share a house with it, I would have barked at you in derision, and despair.

After what feels like 50 years (surely they don’t live that long, do they?) of living with this ball of fluff and saliva – a creature seemingly put on this Earth purely to cover it in a staggering amount of excrement – we recently shifted from our inner-city shoebox to the suburbs, in a move I now realise was mainly made for the sake of the dog.

It would be fair to say that no human in the house has been as delighted with the new digs as the canine chaos machine, which has more grass to crap on, more wooden floors to scratch with its stupid claws, a fire to sleep dangerously close to in winter and plenty of birds, possums and lizards to ineptly and pointlessly chase. 

People – dog people obviously, aka the ones who think I’m evil for not loving all four-legged, stick-obsessed animals – often remark at how happy our oft-cuddled cavoodle, Daisy, looks in “her” new home. I wish we could talk, instead, about how much happier I’d look if she went and lived in the back yard, permanently, where I believe dogs belong.

But the fact is, in our new suburb, she should be ashamed of herself for being such a piddling excuse for a dog. Sadly, dogs don’t feel shame – an animal that will happily lick its own backside in front of you and then attempt to kiss your face clearly has no idea of the concept – so I have to feel it on her behalf.

The problem is that where we used to live, in an inner-city enclave populated with basket weavers and pointed political graffiti, you were basically issued with an “insert-silly-suffix-here oodle” of some kind along with your 14 recycling bins.

Ownership certainly seemed to be compulsory, and actual, full-sized dogs were fully frowned upon, and unwise, because very few people had back yards larger than a picnic blanket. 

Out in the wilds of Sydney where I now live, dogs are no less popular, but they are about 100 per cent more likely to be actual dogs, the alarmingly large kind, with pointy, sensible ears rather than fluffy, floppy ones that look like they’ve been constructed from worn-out Ugg Boots.

Not only do these proper dogs with proper names, like “Scotty” and “Killer”, look at Daisy (I had nothing to do with that name choice, unless ridiculing and scoffing count) with disdain, but their owners look at me the same way (at least they only roll their eyes, rather than drooling on me and attempting to bite my silly ears off).

I do my best to avoid this awkwardness by almost never walking the dog, and always tying it to something – preferably a cactus – if I’m going shopping, but I’ve recently been informed that this is unwise. Apparently, unbelievably, dogs are now worth so much money that people have been attempting to steal them from my local shops, to sell them. 

Looking at my neighbours’ gigantic dogs, of course, there is another possibility. A small child may well have mistaken them for a pony and ridden them home.

At least there is some good news in this gossip, however. If I can just work out a way to sell the family’s dog, I might be able to recoup at least some of the investment in the new house we had to buy for her.