San Franciscans like owning dogs. For San Franciscans dog ownership is like the step in adulthood that comes right after immersing yourself in a meaningful career and right before getting married. San Franciscans especially like to get a dog when they are part of a couple, because owning a dog with your significant other instantly tells the world that you are a couple of dog owners: too fun for a baby, too serious for a cat.
San Franciscans think that a city is a great place for a dog. Never mind that most San Franciscans look less than thrilled when they’re walking their dog down the sidewalk at 6am. NEVER MIND THAT. When you are a human it is part of your civil rights to own an animal and keep it in your tiny apartment, and if your landlord doesn’t understand this and only lists “purrr” at the end of the apartment listing, for God’s sake find yourself another landlord.
San Franciscans are insanely picky when it comes to finding a mate for themselves, but this discriminating attitude doesn’t seem to extend to their dogs. In fact, it’s almost a status symbol in San Francisco to have an extremely homely looking dog. As if San Franciscans want to show that not even being connected by a string to an animal that looks like a sewer rat can take away from the intensity of their good looks.
“San Franciscans want to show that not even being connected by a string to an animal that looks like a sewer rat can take away from the intensity of their good looks”San Franciscans have even found a neat way to get around laws that say that only service dogs can go into restaurants or onto busses. In San Francisco, any dog can be a service dog as long as a psychiatrist says it is so. But why, you wonder, must San Franciscans take their dogs into restaurants? The answer is that many San Franciscans suffer from a rare eating disorder in which they are actually psychologically unable to eat dinner without a dog in their presence. The main fallout of this being that in San Francisco it is extremely difficult to tell a blind person from a sighted one, because pretty much everyone these days is walking around with an animal attached to a leash.
Even newcomers to the city are not safe from this dog obsession, and begin to show symptoms within months of residing within the city limits. I recently showed a picture of my boyfriend’s dog to a friend who lives in Seattle, and she looked at it for only 10-seconds, and then started talking about something else as though she didn’t have a camera phone photo of a dog right in front of her eyes. Didn’t she realize that she was looking at a dog? I didn’t say anything to her, and instead simply replaced the phone in my purse and pretended that we were still friends.
