Some days I really miss The News Blog. This is one of those inane blog problem column letters that Steve Gilliard and the News Blog commenters would have really gotten their teeth into (if you’ll excuse the lame pun):
From Chowhound’s Table Manners blog:
Is Fido Invited?
When it’s not OK to bring your dog to a partyBy Helena Echlin
Dear Helena,
Why are some people so weird about dogs? Ours gets lonely at home, so sometimes we take him out with us. He is a pit bull but has a sweet personality. Recently we took him to a drinks party. He got a little hyper with all the attention he received and was jumping up and begging for cheese straws. Anyway, the hostess got in a snit and told her husband to ask us to take the dog home. I was a little annoyed. He wasn’t making a mess. He was being cute. In fact, his antics were making people let down their guard at kind of a stuffy party. Were we wrong to assume he’d be welcome? —It’s Not a Party Without Dog Drool
No, no way. That has to be a fictitious email. They take their pit bull to parties and they still get invited places? Helena’s reply boggles the mind too:
An uninvited dog could do worse than monopolize the conversation. It might frighten the children, send someone into a sneezing fit, chew on the draperies, or defile the shrubbery. Says Magee: “Sometimes if we go somewhere with a back garden and the other person has a male dog, the dogs tend to get into pissing contests, and Baker may piss on a plant that might be one [the hosts] like.”
Or something even worse could happen.
Yes, it’s a bloody pitbull. It could kill someone. But no, by ‘worse’ the author means embarassing doodies on the parquet, not bloody death by rending fangs:
“The hostess was a strict cat person. The [other] dog was running around chasing her cat, and at the end of the night [the dog] left a giant turd right in the middle of her kitchen.” Magee noticed it, and discreetly told the dog owner during dinner. He made an excuse to slip away from the table. When he returned he murmured to Magee that he had deposited it in the kitchen trash. Magee was horrified. “I made him go back and fish it out and throw it in the woods.”
I wouldn’t be so discreet about it. I’d grab the guy by the scruff of the neck, haul him from the table, make him clean it up on his hands and knees and take the turd home in his pocket. He damned well should be embarassed for having brought an aggressive, unhousebroken animal into someone’s house without permission.
Someone who hasn’t the social nous to know when an animal as a guest isn’t acceptable isn’t someone I’d care to be friends with anyway. I’m not just being snobby: it seems to me to denote a fundamental inability to put yourself in anyone’s position but one’s own. That’s not someone I’d care to invite anywhere.
I have my doubts as to the authenticity of this letter but treating housepets like humans is defintely a spreading trend – and before I get labelled a hater, I love cats and I love dogs too. I’m pretty fond of most animals, even reptiles and some spiders; I spoil our own cats rotten. I’ve committed many and various embarassing social faux-pas in my time too but so my earnest recollection I’ve never ever been so bad-mannered as to take a pitbull to a dinnerparty.
