To be clear: all dogs are good dogs.

I just want to say upfront that your dog is great. He, or she, or they is a good dog. A guddog. 

Pictured: a dog. Yours, someone else's,
it doesn't matter. I will presume it's a good dog.

"Hurray."

-me, in regards 

to your choices

I myself, however, am not a dog owner. Or a cat owner. Or a pet owner of any kind. I have tried it (fish ownership, if you must know), and I've decided it's not for me, along with plant and child ownership. Parentship? What's the word for when you choose to have a child? Whatever, my point is that I don't disparage anyone for their choices. Want a kid/pet/plant? Great, go buy and/or create one. Good on you. It's not for me, but I respect and even celebrate your choices. But I'm a little sick of dog presumption. Wait, where are you going?

Pictured: Noted dog murderer Kristi Noem.
Also, I think she's a governor or something.

The dog isn't presumptuous, the dog, as previously mentioned, is a guddog. Perfect and blameless in all things. What I'm talking about is the presumption on the part of some that merely by including a dog, I should be somehow inclined towards them--that is, the human using using the dog for their own gain, not the dog. And if it sounds like I'm going out of my way to explain to you how I've got no beef with dogs, it's because people who don't like dogs are, by and large, the worst people in the world.

"What are you? Kristi Noem?
Laugh! This is funny!"

-some movie

This came up from me recently when I saw the latest Deadpool movie. It was, you know, two hours of Ryan Reynolds reminding us of awesome stuff from comics. But there was this moment where they introduced Dogpool which is like Deadpool, but a dog. Doesn't matter, the moment he appeared on screen the audience lit up with--what's that thing people feel? It's an emotion...uh, joy? Lit up with joy and laughter and I felt nothing. I just felt like the movie was telling me I should laugh because dog.
 

Wait...are they throwing the
dog in with the tickers?

And, I don' know, it just felt a little exploitive. Like, that dog isn't being paid for his work, and I can't help but feel that folks were laughing at him. He is, if you're unfamiliar, a peculiar looking dog, and I think was included for that reason alone. And then the other day, while blogging about how many Burning Man tickets are floating around, I saw someone use their own dog in a Facebook plea to buy their tickets. And it wasn't the first or last post I would see where someone tried to leverage their dog's dogness to unload an unwanted ticket. What does the dog have to do with this? The dog didn't make them buy too many tickets. And what is the dog getting out of this? Nothing that's what. Have we, as a culture, just accepted the exploitation of our most loyal companions?

Well I'm not standing for it. Are dogs great? Sure. Did we spend thirty-thousand years domesticating them just so they could help us sell suggestive popcorn buckets and Burning Man tickets? No. And we sure as hell didn't domesticate them so they could star in one of the laziest covers in all the Hudson News Airport bookstore's "Thrillers for Dads" section:

You'd think #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Dean Koontz's
publisher would drop more than twenty bucks on cover art.