Beam's Blog of Writing and Other Things.
Dogs, and The People who Shouldn't Own Them.
by , April 15th, 2012 at 01:27 PM (2760 Views)
Let's talk about dogs for a second.
I am, and always have been, a major dog person. When I was a little kid I utterly adored any dogs my friends and extended relatives owned, and for the last nine years my Shetland Sheepdog has been my baby. One thing in particular I've always been proud of is how well my family and I take care of him; he's a well trained, lovable doofus and he's never been without anything in his life.
And today, while walking him, I was reminded that for every good, decent family that takes the time to train a dog and provide it with a good home, there's another family who just shouldn't own a dog, period.
My firm belief is that if you cannot take care of a dog, you should not own one. Good intent is awesome and all, but if you don't have the house for a dog, or the space for a dog, or the time and the energy to properly train a dog, you shouldn't have a dog, IMO. For all of how much a dog itself is a powerful animal, with its muscles and its claws and its teeth, it ultimately is a creature at the mercy of how well you tend to it and how well you train it.
So the neighbors down the street from my house have a dog. She's a young thing, a beautiful female German Shepherd, and to my knowledge is only several months old, if not close to a year already. And she spends most, if not all, of her time tied up in their front yard with a long leash. Which, okay, cool, means she has room to move around, even if she seems a bit too thin and is mostly ignored.
Except she has an extremely bad habit of lunging after cars, which no one has ever tried to train her out of, to my knowledge. And her leash? Is long enough for her to go out into the street. My street has a speed limit of 25 mph, but very rarely do people actually obey it.
You can start to see why this pissed me off beyond all reason.
I understand they wanted a dog, and hell in the beginning, when she was a puppy, they were pretty okay with her. But they clearly don't have the time or the energy anymore to look after her, and it drives me nuts to think that all it'll take one day is some idiot who isn't paying attention, going too fast down the road, and she either gets clipped and badly injured, or run over and killed.
Bah. Hopefully, if I survive this animal science shit, I'll be paid to tell people this kind of thing.
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