Some of you may already know about my love of dogs, but I feel it’s necessary to hammer the point home again. I LOVE dogs. Unless you are also a dog lover to the degree I am, you probably wouldn’t understand how heartbreaking it has been to not to have a full-time dog in my life since I moved out of home1. But that’s exactly what it is: heartbreaking.
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In August, it will have been six years since I last lived with a dog. I have spent those six years dreaming about the day when life can go back to normal, and I can return home to someone who is always happy to see me and a vacuum cleaner full of dog hair. But alas, this might not happen for another six years because like most Kiwis with degrees, were hoping to work overseas for a while. The process of quarantine is just too much of a hassle and a pretty large expense, and the experience is probably pretty damn traumatising for the dogs.
And even if we WERE willing to put our doggy friends through something like that, there’s the whole “landlords against dogs” movement which throws another spanner in the works even before we get to the moving overseas stage. It’s near on impossible to find rental properties in this area that will allow dogs… or at least the kind of dogs I would like to add to my family. The kind that look scary and destructive but are actually really smart and easily trained sweethearts… and the kind with responsible owners.
So, for now, I have to settle for brief visits to my parents’ place to cuddle and play with Wicket. He’s not a big dog like the one(s) I’d like to get, but he’ll do. At least until I go absolutely batshit crazy over the lack of my own precious dog children.
Too late?
P.S. I really need to hide the local SPCA and Dogster from my Facebook news feed because it’s adding to the problem (stories about dogs needing homes), but I just can’t bring myself to do it.
- Apart for the few months my parents were living with us.
