Big Dogs Need Not Apply

I’m thinking of selling my house & moving. My neighborhood has become unworkable (subject of another rant). I’ve been out of the rental market for awhile, and man. Things sure have changed. I’ve been spendingtime on Craigslist looking for a rental & seen that the landlords who will even consider dogs specify that you have to pay an exorbitant non-refundable deposit, or the dog has to stay outside all the time, or it has to weigh less than some amount of weight that makes the creature barely qualify as a dog. One landlord actually posted that the dog had to weigh “less than 10 pounds.” I fired off an email: “Did you mean to say ‘hamster’?”

So I posted this on email: Subject: “BIG DOGS ARE BETTER THAN OKAY–WOOF!

“Small dogs only????? As in those yappy, snarling, vicious, aggressive, destructive, pissy little yappers? These are the ones you allow into your rental properties? You obviously don’t know dogs very well. If you did, you’d either specify “NO SMALL DOGS,” or “NO DOGS UNDER 20 POUNDS” or at least “DOGS ALLOWED ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS,” since of course there are some nice little dogs too.

I have 2 big dogs. They are calm & well behaved, & when they are in the house they basically lie around most of the time waiting for me to take them out. When they are out in the back yard, they are either loping around quietly or lying in the sun. I can’t understand the mentality that says small dogs, like those snarling little monsters that hit the car glass with their heads like snakes trying to bite you and NEVER stop yapping & scratching & snapping & shivering, are better than this. I mean, really.

Now, if you took a small dog like the one I’ve just described and made it weigh 100 pounds, then you’d really have something to worry about. But that’s just not going to happen. In my experience with dogs (which is considerable), the bigger the dog, the calmer the dog. Why do you think they call the Mastiffs & others that weigh 200 pounds “gentle giants”? If you have a responsible tenant, that person is going to be a responsible dog owner, and vice versa. The size of the dog is secondary. Please, stop discriminating against big dogs.”

You can’t imagine the hate mail that ensued. I actually got into a heated exchange with some guy who had had his one place damaged by one big dog (hardly a basis for generalization). He said it was like paint. The bigger the volume, the more area it covers. My response was to say Except that small dogs shoot out paint like a pressure washer, and with big dogs the paint just dribbles out. I don’t know why the example that popped into my head was one of spray paint rather than cans of paint; maybe it was the last kind of paint I had used. I thought the analogy was accurate, at any rate. He decided that because I had used spray paint as an example, I was probably a huffer or a crackhead. My take was that the dog that had (allegedly) wrecked his place hadn’t really done it at all. The damage was done by an irresponsible dog owner, & the dog had just carried that out like some kind of evil Familiar.

Anyway, the post was flagged for removal. Not sure if that actually happened.