Here's something I tried to get paid for, but no takers. Sadly, it has been cleansed of arbitrary links and weird pictures because it's for public consumption. Happily, you get to read it for free if you're not busy watching Chris Christie deal with bridge-gate. Also, it's about dogs and everyone seemed to like my last dog piece.
Before deciding to adopt a dog, it is important to weigh the
positives and negatives of pet ownership. On the plus side, children will learn
responsibility, dogs can be effective theft deterrent, and a dog will still
love you even when your children transform into surly teenagers. On the minus
side, a puppy will have housebreaking accidents that can wreck the floors and
rugs, dogs need to be walked even in sub-freezing weather, and, of course,
there is the not-inconsiderable cost of pet ownership. Dogs need to eat, visit
the veterinarian, attend obedience training, and need to be boarded when you
leave town. Even if you take all these standard costs into account, you should
know that there are hidden costs of
dog ownership that you won’t find listed in any puppy care book. I learned this
the hard way when we adopted our new puppy.
My first glimpse of a hidden cost came when our new puppy
started chewing leaves off the hosta plants in our backyard. At first it was
cute to see a seven-pound ball of fluff trot inside with a hosta frond hanging
out of her mouth like she was off to fan the emperor. But, a quick Internet
search revealed the unpleasant truth that chewing on hosta might be dangerous
to dogs. According to some sources, it can cause stomach upset and, of all things,
depression. Because our backyard is basically a hosta showroom, we had to
transplant all the hosta to the side of the house that the puppy couldn’t
access. Of course, we couldn’t leave gaping holes in the backyard, so we had to
get new (dog-friendly) plants to replace the hosta. When everything was
finished, we had completely overhauled our backyard landscaping with plants
that would not harm our puppy’s digestive tract or psyche…for a price.
