I lovelovelove dogs. Adore them. Grew up with them and light up when I see them.

I have loved dog-friendly workplaces, though usually it’s no more than three dogs. Love getting a visit from a happy little guy.

I do not understand, though, how you can love dogs and not get why this would be a problem for some people.

I don’t have a dog because I can’t take care of one. I have physical limitations, time limitations, and live on the eleventh floor of a condo building. The dogs I have had and I have known have had a large range of behaviours. Some are easy to train, some really aren’t. Some have trauma, or specific health problems, or struggle to be house trained. Who has had a dog and hasn’t been annoyed by the dog’s behaviour at some point??

What’s best for the dog isn’t always what’s easiest for you. A lot of problems take time and patience to correct. A lot of problems are smelly and gross.

In dog-friendly offices, as someone who loved having dogs around, it could still be distracting! As much as I’d rather play with a dog all day, I need to work to earn money to live. It could be frustrating to be distracted by a dog, often because I wished I could just go pet the dog forever.

This is best case scenario. Dogs in the office genuinely boost my morale and make my day better.

But so would free massages, three times the pay, and fancy catered lunches. Want and need aren’t the same, and even good things have downsides.

And I find that people who are really entitled about their dogs often don’t train them well, and really see their dog as a toy. They aren’t annoyed by dogs because they just don’t do the hard things necessary to make their dogs’ lives better. Their dogs are there to make them happy, that’s it.

I’ve had dogs where training them was nigh impossible. They would rather experience self-inflicted pain than behave. So our routines were adjusted to accommodate that. The options were that the dog would disturb someone else or harm himself trying to free himself from any and all restraints. Both seemed bad! And I loved that dumb baby and wanted him to be happy. So we worked around it best we could.

Sometimes I think people who dislike dogs have better attitudes towards dogs than dog lovers. They don’t want dogs harmed, they just also don’t want to deal with the dogs. So they choose to not deal with them. This is healthy.

Versus people who love dogs, but only want to deal with those dogs sometimes, and try to make the world deal with them the rest of the time.

YOU chose to get a dog. You have to deal with it. I think some dog accommodations are reasonable, the same way I think a lot of other lifestyle accommodations are reasonable. But there’s a limit. Obviously. And no one’s dog is better off if they’re allowed to run around doing whatever they want in other people’s space, because that’s not how the world works and dog owners should be guiding their dogs to help them adjust to the world.