Quantifying Canine Chaos
A sabermetric tool for measuring the specific impact of your good boy or girl
“We already have a dog, what’s one more?”
This is a foolish sentiment that took hold in my household recently. Now, as longtime readers well know, I’m a dog person. My wife and I have had one dog, our beloved 11-year-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi Holly, since she was a tiny puppy. She’s a very low-maintenance dog, easy to tire out by merit of her tiny legs, and she asks very little of us on a daily basis.
It’s possible that this may have lulled us into a false sense of our ability as dog owners.
Ever since we moved into a house with a yard four years ago, we’ve talked about getting a buddy for Holly, a bigger dog than we were able to accommodate when we lived in a tiny New York City apartment like when we first brought her home.
The math seemed simple; we have one dog, and so two dogs will be twice that amount of work. Well, math has never been a strong suit for either of us.1
We may have miscalculated.
Just over a week ago, a rescue organization we’d been following for a while posted about a sw…