the dogs would routinely sleep in bed with me and an ex. in the middle of the night one night we wake up the sound of one of them about to throw up. i slid out from under the covers and out of the bed in what seemed like a millisecond before she yacked on the comforter.
Dog howled to be let out twice the other night. Had some diarrhea unfortunately, but thankfully could hold it until they got out (unlike when they were a puppy...). Same night my kid had a nose bleed twice and had to change the sheets twice. Next day was a blur.
I always feel bad for dogs in this situation. Like, if you were locked out of your bathroom 22 hours of every day, you'd also have a LOT of bathroom mishaps.
This is one of the main reasons why I don't own a dog.
I have a few friends with very expensive homes in southern Ontario near the city. I love one friend who absolutely wanted to have pure bred golden retrievers. They make for fantastic family photos with your nuclear family and beautiful house.
But over the past ten years, I've had to help them vacuum up vomit and diarrhea from their beautiful living room with expensive furniture. They have two dogs and the worst event was during a visit to see them and one evening, one dog vomited about a gallon of liquid and the other dog shat a gallon of liquid. These are close friends to my family so we spent a week helping them vacuum, suction, steam clean and deep clean the carpets ... TWICE!!!!
This is on top of having to take a walk in their nice neighbourhood in their designer clothes and periodically bending down to grab dog shit from the sidewalk or park near their home.
I grew up with dogs as a kid and I'm Indigenous Canadian and my dad kept sled dogs for many years. My parents didn't believe in keeping pets. They taught me that if you wanted to keep an animal, the animal had to work for you in exchange for you feeding and taking care of it. Otherwise you were abusing the animal by keeping it just for your own personal pleasure.
I've always been on the fence about all that. .... but after vacuuming up vomit and diarrhea, more often than I care to admit and picking up dog shit ... I don't think I want a dog.
Honestly my reaction to rwading that is "what the fuck are they feeding the dogs"
I have three cats, one of whom has a chronic condition and one who is geriatric with a weaponised arsehole and I don't deal with that much bullshit.
I can count on one hand the number of times my dog has thrown up, and he's been with us over 6 years. What were your friends giving their dogs?
And honestly, picking up poop is part of having a dog, just like cleaning the litter box is a necessary chore for cats. If you don't want to do it, then yeah you shouldn't get a dog. I mean, I don't really want to do it either, but I recognize it's part of owning a dog. I don't like going out in the rain, snow, or hot sun to walk him, either, but, again... It's part of the deal.
Our dog has no chores, he's spoiled.
They had a very nervous, anxious dog. I think it had something to do with being a pure, pure bred Golden Retriever ... I hate to say it but my friend really wanted a 'good looking' dog to fit into all their family photos. They're a high strung family with a father that works at a plant and the wife is in education and the two kids were attending school far away from home so busing or driving by car every day. This all meant that the two dogs who were already very needy were left at home alone for hours every day ... family comes home ... everything goes chaotic for an hour two and then every disappears again ... family comes home for an hour or two and everyone is back in bed. Repeat .. every single day even on weekends and holidays because the family is constantly on the move with work, cottage, hockey, dancing, swimming, soccer, recitals, school events and on and on. I felt bad for the dogs because I knew they were just kept in this huge beautiful home for most of their lives with no one.
In all, up until the dogs were about five or six, they got sick at least once a year. It got so bad that the family was considering giving up the dogs but either the dogs got better with the environment or they sensed that they would lose their home if they didn't stop puking or crapping inside the house.
I will never understand why my friend wanted those dogs. The dogs are now almost ten and now just laze and lounge about the house without a care and it takes a lot of effort for anyone to take them for a walk. I think the dogs just don't care any more.
Awwwww that's sad. I think our dog could be a handful, but he gets 3 or 4 walks every day, and play time, and some of those walks involve zoomies (I'm not a runner, but I imagine the neighbors are all used to seeing me run with the dog, just trying to burn off his energy).
So he tends to spend much of his time just lounging around the house. If my wife is watching TV, it's a pretty good bet he's going to be cuddled up with her.
He's a really happy dog. Loves everyone and everything.
That said, I've already decided we're not adopting another one. I love him, but I also do most of the work - feeding him, walking him, etc. I also take care of the cats. Maybe I'll feel differently now that I've retired and have more time, but before that, I was overwhelmed with all of the chores in the house.
This hits a little close for me because an ex was kinda the same way. Wakes up and lets the dogs out while she got ready, then locked em in the kitchen while at work. Her parents would come over everyday midday to let them out, then lock em back up in the kitchen. She'd get home after work and let em out and put food in their bowls as she locked em up again...if there was time before one of her after-work activities (huge into local theater so if she wasn't doing community production it was a school production). And often would go out for drinks at some point and maybe finally get back home around 10ish, let em out and then sit on the couch for a couple hours and fall asleep there. Always had an excuse for never taking them for a walk or doing anything stimulating for the dogs, never trained or obedience so the dogs never had boundaries or barely even how to sit. I swear she treated them as accessories or toys. And one of the dogs, the dachshund, barked at everything, climbing on anything, and more often than not would pee/shit on the kitchen floor. When I finally did do some convincing and started taking them for walks, one couldn't sit still to get the hardness on, while the dachshund would piss when you tried to get hers on.
I felt bad for the dogs.
The more I see pet owners like this, the less I want to actually want to own a dog.
I don't have a particularly busy life but its busy enough and I know that I would have to sacrifice a lot of my time in order to take care of a pet .... which is why I don't think I will ever get one. It's just way too much responsibility and I know I wouldn't be able to fulfill those needs .... I might be able to for periods of time but for the majority of the time, I can't.
And most of the people I know are way more busy than me in so many ways .... yet they are the ones who own pets!
Man your friends suck absolute arse
True story. One of our dogs is a toy poodle. When he was a puppy, we had to closely monitor how much he ate because he would overdo it and have explosive poops in the middle of the night.
And when I say "explosive", I mean the dog is covered in shit. The top, bottom, and sides of his crate are covered in shit. The floor outside of his crate is covered in shit. This dog weighs two pounds and is completely surrounded by like five pounds of shit.
I wake up at 2:00 AM, after just letting him go poop outside an hour ago, and this is what I find. All you can really do is stand there for a minute wondering how the hell this even happened. How did that much poop come out of one tiny dog? It shouldn't be physically possible and yet here we are.
Thankfully he grew out of that. ...just in time for our other geriatric, blind, arthritic shit rat to develop incontinence.
Maybe the dog wouldn't be so tiny if he didn't poop so much
and this is why I'll never have another pet after my current ones die.
Same.
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