Confessions of a dog hater

Rishi Sunak’s plan to ban American Bully XLs is welcome news for us dog haters. It’s long been said that pooches are man’s best friend. But this is a problem if, like me, you love men, but are less than enamoured with his mate. If what the Spice Girls said about needing to get along with the friends of your paramour is true, then us cynophobes face solitude amidst the wilderness of dog-loving Englishmen on the dating scene. 

Over the years, I have mastered the art of gracefully skipping over the topic of dogs. But the prevalence of these animals is such that, sooner or later, the topic must be faced. Admitting you can’t stand man’s best friend is seen by many as a red flag, something you are forced to justify. But pretending you like them is also problematic: if you are not up front early on, you face the prospect of inadvertently becoming stepmother to a slobbering four-legged creature called ‘Baxter’ who shares the bed and even has its own toothbrush by the sink. Frankly, I’d rather a man ask me what house I’d be in at Hogwarts, or engage me in deep lore about Warhammer, than talk to him about his dog.

This aversion to dogs didn’t come from nowhere. I’ve met plenty of dogs, in grotty pubs, in the park – I even lived with one for a while. I can accept that many people think they’re cute. But they’re just not for me. Why do I need to love dribbling, stunted animals that ruin your furniture, bark, stink, never fully mature, and watch on smugly as you’re forced to stoop, pick up and dispose of their waste every day? Are men not enough?

Time and again I’m met with the same arguments. One is that dogs are therapeutic. I suppose this is true if meant in the sense that you waste an eye-watering amount of time and money for someone to watch you talk to yourself. Another classic excuse is that they’re ‘nicer than people’. It’s a uniquely British opinion of canids, and also applies to pigs. The English have no qualms eating pigs, but when I reveal my Vietnamese heritage, people look at me like I’m a monster when I joke about sautéing their beloved ‘Fido’. 

My least favourite argument is that dogs make people better. It’s said that some folks need a dog to develop empathy, show emotion, and form a routine of getting out of the house. Even that it makes them more balanced. Honestly? I’ve never met a person who became better-adjusted because of a dog. If anything, I’ve witnessed a western-wide infantilisation of people and their pedigree chums.

Since when was it normal to refer to a dog as your ‘baby’? Yes, they eat faeces, can’t speak English and crawl on all fours, but that’s their upper limit, not the base setting. Yet dogs are rewarded for this failure to develop – despite generations of exposure to human culture and selective breeding for intelligence – with coos and kisses. 

‘Looky-wooky at his little face,’ my friend says at the stony indifference of a miniature Schnauzer. ‘Couldn’t you just eat him up?’

‘Yes,’ I’ll reply, with equal stony-faced seriousness, before the subject is awkwardly changed.

Millennials like to complain they’re hard done by as a generation, and there’s some truth to this. But at a time of falling birthrates, which tend to foretell civilisational crisis, people are spending what money and time they have not on their own genetic continuation but on substitutes for it. 

This is the behaviour of a species that deserves its fate. And unlike the panda, there is no higher species looking out for us to try and snap us out of our idiocy. Instead of procreating, millennial dog owners mimic some of the worst traits of parents – oversensitivity, overbearingness – to the point where not liking dogs is, somehow, less socially acceptable than not wanting kids. Dating apps will let you discriminate by all sorts of things: height, race, politics, drug history, and, of course, children. And yet, there is still no filter for dogs. 

Perhaps now, thanks to the ongoing war on Bully XLs, we can start to shift the dial on the tacit consensus that dogs are fundamentally angelic. But, of course, that won’t happen. In England, it’s always the owners’ fault that a dog named ‘Killer Kong III’ ripped apart a poodle while walking down the high street. Not Killer Kong’s.

They say the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So perhaps I will have to look into getting a Bully XL of my own – that is unless Rishi Sunak gets there first and bans them. At least until then I’d have a friend to share my disdain for both dog and mankind. If you can’t beat them, join them.