Doggie Daze

Have I ever told you what a pain in the neck it is to travel with a stroller? I don’t care how much money you spend on a state-of-the-art contraption, you will still find yourself unable to open or close the damn thing on your first attempt. I paid $900 for the Cadillac of strollers that you can use 7 different ways…all of which require you to first open the frame. So you can imagine my displeasure as I stood on a Manhattan street corner in the freezing cold, snowflakes beginning to fall, beating this stroller against the ground as my 2-week-old’s car seat rocked precariously on the curb. But what choice did I have, I simply had to have my roots done!

All that to say, hauling around a stroller so that your child can accompany you on a family outing is an unfortunately necessary pain…..hauling around a stroller so that your dog can accompany you on a shopping trip, is insanely stupid.  And what’s worse, enough people take these moronic outings that manufacturers have devised an actual doggie stroller- there’s even a jogging version. Now you mean to tell me an animal with twice the leg power of any human, can’t go for a run on their own? Most dogs could outrun their owners any day of the week. Ok, so your dog’s too small to keep up with you…THEN LEAVE IT AT HOME!

 

 

 

Now before you go all animal rights on me, I am all for service animals and I will happily allow them access to any public place, but tiny balls of fluff wearing designer jackets are only serving to get on my nerves. 

I once saw a man pushing a stroller filled with not one, not two, but three Yorkie puppies, all wearing hair bows, through a department store while his wife shopped for designer clothes and jewelry. Now you are 70-years-old and obviously successful enough in your professional life to be able to afford nice things, so one might assume you are a relatively intelligent, rational person. Yet here you are, a grown-ass man, telling a tiny mongrel that “mommy will be right back,” while wheeling the dogs in a circle to keep them entertained. That poor fella was castrated by a cat with a canine and too dumb to notice.

As someone who has birthed a couple of actual children, I can tell you that the benefit of having a dog is that you can leave them at home without social services paying you a visit. If I am going to lug a stroller full of drooling whiners to the mall, it’s only because the state frowns upon leaving them locked in their rooms. To do it willingly for creatures that lick their own butt in public, suggests either a disconnect with reality or a surplus of free time. So call your shrink or crank up your charity work, and see if you can’t get yourself back into the land of the functionally sane.

Look, dogs are man’s best friend because they have so much in common with a man…just give them something to eat and leave the TV on and they basically never know you’re gone!