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About five years ago in the small town of Dwight, Ont., located just outside the western entrance to Algonquin Park, I sat with my wife on a Muskoka chair in the summer sun and watched other cottagers head in and out of the coffee shop and the canoe store.
We had our new poodle, Annie, perched beside us. She still had remnants of her former glory as a show dog (we had bought her “as is” from a breeder who’d given up on her when a thyroid problem appeared). Her legs had been groomed into pantaloons and her head was shorn to resemble a lion. We were in the transition phase of our relationship with our first dog, breaking her old habits, transposing our rules and thinking about what kind of haircut to give her.
The dog I never wanted
I never wanted to get a dog.
Since she is a poodle, considered to be the second-smartest breed, we were confident that the routines of our home would be quickly learned and that her age (four years) nicely excused us from the agony of puppy training. However, my confidence in the combined intelligence of two species – homo sapiens and canine – blinded me to the prescient wisdom of an old man that sunny day who got out of his boat-like car, looked straight at me and loudly pronounced, “Glad I don’t have a dog. It would cramp my style!”
I don’t know why I reacted, but I responded just as crankily, “What style?”
He harrumphed and tottered into the coffee shop without another word. I think I gave him the gears because I was worried that he had a vision of my future. Maybe he knew something about my life that I could not see and his bold statement would ring true in time, even though my immediate response was denial.
The dog has cramped my style.
Indeed, the dog has crimped the freedoms I had finally acquired when I grew out of parenting small children (who at the time we got Annie were becoming tweens). Done with stuffing electrical sockets and blocking stairways, no longer carrying bags filled with wipes and bottles and emergency rations, finally emancipated from sleep deprivation, I was ready to enjoy, if not my golden years, then at least the brief time remaining before the kids became teens with the attendant anxieties that would bring.
I felt I could now paint the house and buy new furniture. The dog took that away from me.
I should have extrapolated from the first few days we had Annie what a dog can do to a home’s structural and decorative elements. Left alone in the house on her third day while we were at work and school, Annie etched, scratched and gouged the front door and casing in a futile attempt to escape.
When she finally accepted her fate with us, Stockholm syndrome took over and Annie greeted us with high jumps and squealing barks. We can never unlock the front door quickly enough to interrupt these histrionics and so Annie jumps up, then slides down, the door, leaving metre-long scratches.
I recently painted the interior side of our front door a gorgeous blue-black, and to stop Annie from ruining it I have had to devise a barrier made of foam board suspended from strings. Each morning, I place the strings around the hinge and knob before leaving for work and remember how I used to close the gate on the stairs or place the rail on the bed for the kids.
Annie has a sensitive stomach – or maybe she just gets sick a lot because she will eat anything. A favourite treat is dried worms off the sidewalk, but she is fond of the new corn-based fertilizers and greedily devours her cat cousin’s food at my mother-in-law’s house.
When the problems begin we are usually up all night with her, opening the back door to the canine outhouse. I leave most of the morning newspaper over the dining-room rug, her preferred location for the indoor commode.
We close all the bathroom doors when we are gone because she will empty the garbage cans, and Christmas presents of chocolate are only displayed moments before being consumed so Annie will not eat them. Once she was on a chocolate high all night and I stayed up to calculate the ratio of chocolate ingested to body weight, concluding that she would live.
Holidays were supposed to become easier after the kids grew older. Yes, more money would be paid, but I wouldn’t have to play Marco Polo in the pool or stand beside them on pony rides. I could now sip my mojito and read the paper and perhaps play a game of chess with the kids.
Then we got the dog. We used to drive up to the cottage and stop for lunch in Huntsville, Ont., but now we push on because we can’t leave Annie in the van. I used to dream of walks on nature trails uninterrupted by dawdling children, but I now stop every few metres for a urinating animal (how can a dog pee so often with so little?). I used to enjoy sitting on the cottage deck listening to nothing but birdsong, but the dog paces the perimeter and barks at imaginary deer in unpredictable, heart-stopping bursts.
The old man at the coffee shop perhaps had a dog and lost his style during the years it was his pet. Without the furry beast to enslave him, he achieved his freedom and became the master of his domain and not the master of a canine. Never discount the wisdom of old men – I bet he stopped for lunch that day, then watched the sun set from his dock, in style.

Article from “The Globe and Mail”, written by Kevin Bray.