Why I Hate Dogs

I love children, flowers and Touched By An Angel. I once even sent cards to my grandmothers for that fake Grandparents Day holiday. That’s not going to happen again. But no matter how much I want to be a normal, manly, overconsuming American, I can’t get myself to like dogs. I don’t want to hate dogs. But I just can’t imagine sharing my apartment with some dirty, dependent animal willing to trade unconditional love for canned food that, to be honest, I find a little salty. How can people love something so much that they’re willing to walk behind it and retrieve its feces with their own hands every day? I have yet to meet a woman for whom I’d do that.

Dog owners are a mystery to me. I once went on a long series of nonproductive dates with one, and every time we were about to fool around, she would have to leave to go home and walk her dog. Hey, wait. I think I just figured out something.

They send their pets to dog salons and dog psychologists, who prescribe them dog antidepressants. June 25 is the first Take Your Dog to Work Day. June 26 is Why Does This Office Smell Bad? Day. While the homeless go ignored, almost 28.5 million Americans bought their dogs Christmas presents last year. A woman I know throws her dogs a Bar Mitzvah every year. That’s not even correct on a religious level. People knit their dogs things. Now I’ve never knitted anything, but it looks like a pretty serious endeavor. If getting married meant knitting something instead of buying a ring, there would be even more out-of-wedlock births.

Dog owners, please don’t buy that leash-on-a-reel thing that takes up 40 ft. of sidewalk. Save yourself some money: let your dog run free and use a large stick to trip people with instead. And why do you get offended when I refer to your dog as “it”? Was I supposed to be checking out its genitals the whole time? Or am I just supposed to get some kind of feminine vibe from your bulldog’s strut?

No, I wasn’t bitten by a dog as a kid or raised by cats. It’s just that dogs frighten me and kind of gross me out. Last week Mexico City, upon which dogs drop around 120,000 tons of feces a year, appealed to owners to clean up after their dogs because it was causing major health problems. Plus, dogs are the only animals I know of that are sexually interested in breeds 500 times smaller than them. They’re worse than frat boys.

I decided that I’m no longer going to remain a victim of my fears. The New York City parks department, which claims dogs do $250,000 worth of damage each year to park lawns in Manhattan, is going to hand out cell phones to volunteers willing to turn in owners of unleashed dogs. Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern told me that he would put me on the list for a phone but that the program hadn’t been started yet because he was waiting for a cell-phone company to give him some second-hand ones. I was going to tell him just to wait for a leash company to get rid of some old leashes, but I really wanted the phone. I’m not even planning on using it to tattle. Whenever I see a dog owner, I’m going to talk loudly and obnoxiously about how I just bought a cell phone and this is my first call. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.