Sit, Stay, Go Away

OK, dog owners in and around Harvard College, I know that you think your dogs are the most adorable things in the world. They’re small and cheerful and amusing, but without the added burden of actual emotional interaction. They’ll love you forever and like you for always and all you have to give them in return is a place to poop and canned food to eat. It’s a pretty sweet deal, and congratulations on filling the void in your lives with a dumb, fuzzy friend.

However, follow everyone else’s example and keep it to yourselves. Take me, for example.

I personally prefer to fill the empty void in my life with alcohol, not furry parasites. And yet out of respect for others, I limit my public displays of affection for alcohol to two nights a week. (My private displays are another matter.) Physics majors who fill the void with Starcraft II manage to lock it up and save it for the LAN party, and hipsters who fill it with obscure music keep their headphones on and their mouths shut. Even football players can keep the game on the field and out of my way.

Why can’t you do the same?

I’m not saying I hate dogs. I can appreciate them for their cleverness and their wily ways of fooling us into feeding them. Power to you, small mammal. But there comes a point in the life of every higher-thinking being when enough is enough. They need to stay out of my dining hall entrance and the Yard, which is not a public park, and also out of the Quad lawn. In short, they need to stop being imposed on me.

I didn’t choose to bring dogs into this place. I don’t think they’re that cute. Some of them are little and irritating, some of them are big and doofy and clumsy. End of story. I can twist the adjectives to be polite — “tiny” or “toy,” “klutzy” or “cuddly” — but we all know what I mean: “Oh God your dog is annoying but you love it so much that I will be nice.” It’s like 24/7 ugly baby syndrome. You know, when someone has that one-in-two-million-chance super ugly baby and you have to pretend it’s cute because babies are supposed to be? I live this awkwardness every time I “meet” someone’s dog (yes, they use that word). And why? These are not babies; it’s not like I’m implying the owner is ugly, or that she and her husband are a genetic landmine, if I think their bichon frise looks like a real-life creepy Snuggle bear. It just does.

I don’t ask you to compliment me on that great deal I got on a 30-rack last week. No social norm says that you have to act incredibly interested in what level of Starcraft your friend has reached. And yet we all have to pretend to like your dog and think it’s adorable when it pisses on our legs. Nobody is obligated to pretend it’s cute when a drunk person does that.

Dingoes eat babies, and dogs are mini-dingoes. When our Puritan forefathers founded this College, they let dogs and cows in the Yard and kept women and minorities out. We have reversed one of those things, now let’s get after reversing the other.