Dog owner = masochist

There are many people out there who would consider me to have a masochistic streak and others, no doubt, who would suggest that I, my wife and our house are dirty. Far be it from me to suggest that either school of thought is wrong, but the cause of the views of both schools is our choice. We are dog owners. We have been for, oh, forty-five years or more. Not the same dog all the time, of course, but apart from the first year and the gaps between our different dogs we have owned dogs for our entire married lives. On those cold winter mornings when the rain is lashing not down but almost horizontally in a fierce north-east wind, my opinion is not that I am a masochist; rather a raving lunatic. All our dogs seem to have or have had the ability to attract mud and wet leaves to their fur and to have needed to be dried thoroughly before being allowed back into the house, but they have to be walked every day no matter what the weather.

Which brings us to another reason why dog owners are considered either mad or masochistic: not only do dogs have to be walked in all weathers, they have to be walked daily and really cannot be left on their own all day. This means that the sudden urge to, for example, make a trip to London to visit museums and take in a show has to be put down. Days out need to be planned well in advance so that somebody is available to look after the dog. It could even be that the animal has to go into kennels for a couple of nights, adding considerably to the expense of the day out. And when it comes to taking a holiday for a week or, heaven forbid! a fortnight, it's almost a case of taking out a mortgage to pay the extra costs. Kennels don't come cheap.

Nor do vets' bills. We have been using the same veterinary surgery since acquiring our first dog, although the vets have changed over the years. All the vets we have seen have been highly satisfactory and when we talk to other dog owners we find that our vet's fees are not as high as most others' in the town. I suppose that must be a bit of a bonus, but we still hope that nothing major goes wrong as we have consistently refused to take out pet insurance. Even the vet advised against doing that, saying that we would be better off putting the equivalent of the monthly premium into a savings account and drawing on that if need be.

All of which just goes to support the "You're a masochist" school of thought. But there is a flip side and perhaps I will manage to cover that another day.