Sunday New S Cape - Wanted: Dog by Rob Bloom

Wanted: Dog by Rob Bloom

Written by Rob Bloom

Sunday, 31 August 2008

We’re trying to get a dog. Much like completing an inflight magazine crossword or assembling IKEA furniture, you wouldn’t think this would be as hard as it sounds. Think again. See, my wife Julie and I are trying to “rescue” a dog. Basically, this means you go to a facility where there’s a big sign on the door that reads “Warning: Entry Into This Room Will Cause Heartbreak” and you see a dozen or so dogs - eleven of which are Pit Bulls - and,

because you can’t bear the thought of leaving one of them cramped in their tiny fly-ridden cage, you walk out with a dog. Then, as you’re driving home, feeling pretty good about yourself, Splat!, the dog pukes all over your lap (note: You’d be alarmed how often this happens).

Truth is, rescuing a dog is only slightly less complicated than going to a bulk store and calculating if you’re really saving any money by buying 30 rolls of dental floss at a time. The reason for this is that rescue facilities have very strict requirements for potential dog owners and Julie and I are less-than-ideal candidates because:

a) We don’t have a fenced-in backyard.
b) On weekdays, we are away from home for hours at a time.
c) We’d like a dog that weighs less than a refrigerator.

We can’t do much about the first one; it’s part of the problem with renting an apartment. Now sure, we could put up a fence around the communal courtyard area - a solution that would alleviate any fears of the dog wandering off but, on the downside, would keep unwanted objects inside which means little Aiden Murphy from apartment E-5 would forever be running around in circles, pretending to be a pirate, and stabbing me with his plastic sword.

As far as being away for hours at a time, that’s a toughie. Life would certainly be easier if we didn’t have to work. Of course then we wouldn’t have any money to groom the dog, or ourselves for that matter, and we’d all end up looking like a Troll doll or Tom Hanks in “Castaway.” Moving on, there’s the issue of size. Julie and I want a small-to-midsize dog and most of the dogs we’ve seen at rescue facilities have been comically enormous. I can’t imagine exactly how much food these dogs eat but I’m pretty sure that, as we walked by their cages, the dogs salivated at us, seeing only cartoonish pieces of meat.

The process of us searching for a dog has been going on for about two months now. It was exciting at the beginning. We’d search for dogs online, find a couple of prospects, and fill out application forms. Then, while waiting to hear about the status of our application, the dog(s) would be adopted by someone else. By the fourth or ninth time this happened, we were pretty discouraged. Until yesterday. That’s when we found out our application had made it to the next stage: the home visit.

The home visit is when a representative from the facility, well, visits your home to see if you’d be good doggie parents. In our case, the visit was from a nice woman named Shannon and her three-page questionnaire. We sat around our kitchen table and, after exchanging a few pleasantries, Shannon exploded into rapid fire questioning:

“What will happen to the dog if you move?”
“What will happen to the dog if it gets sick?”
“What will happen to the dog if it pulls back the curtain to reveal a chubby man pretending to be a wizard?”

We really did try to answer the questions earnestly, but after a while you start to feel like you’re on a hidden camera show. So you get silly. And while Shannon didn’t seem to care for my response to “How will you exercise the dog?,” I thought “we’ll stick it on a treadmill” was a reasonable answer. But despite my desire to continue with these types of answers (Q: “What will you do if you the dog attacks a child?” A: “We’d give it a treat.”), I realized why we were being put through the rigorous questioning. It’s because there are these cretins in this world, cleverly disguised as human beings, who “rescue” dogs and sell the animals to hack labs where they undergo cruel medical testing. Because of these idiots, the rescue facilities want to be sure they’re giving a dog to a genuine loving home.

So where do we stand now? Thanks to Shannon approving our application (yay!), we’re now waiting for the right dog to come along. Cross your fingers that we find our dog soon. And that it doesn’t puke on my lap on the way home.

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