My family and I failed in our attempt to adopt a dog from an animal shelter. We thought it would be easy, but the adoption questionnaire should have alerted me to the quagmire that lay ahead.
Before we'd even visited the shelter I had to answer reams of personal, interrogatory questions: how many family members lived in our house? How many hours per day did each one spend at home? Where would the dog sleep? Did we have a pool and, if so, how large were the gaps between the fence palings?
I hadn't even wanted a dog. We had a perfectly beautiful cat, which had come from the Animal Welfare League and which completed our neat family of two parents and three children. Though I'd grown up in a household of dogs, I wasn't particularly endeared to them. They made a noise, they made a mess, they seemed dirty. As an adult I still compulsively scrubbed my hands if I accidentally brushed against one.
But my youngest daughter was an animal lover. She gently caught the tiniest of lizards and released them safe from the cat's claws. She collected snails. She recued huntsman spiders from the bedrooms of her squirming older siblings. She cradled a wild baby rabbit all the way to the vet and sobbed violently when the injured animal died in her hands. She loved the cat but was desperate, above all, for a dog.
Our hearts were set on Leni. He stared out at us from the shelter's website, liquid-brown eyes imploring us to take him home. On the appointed day, we arrived at the shelter excited at the prospect of leaving with a new family member.
As policy dictated, we walked Leni (and a group of other dogs) around the semi-rural neighbourhood. We warmed to him instantly: he was a timid little terrier-mix abandoned by who-knows-who and surrounded for who-knows-how-long at a shelter where around 100 other dogs waited for families to adopt them.
Leni seemed to like us, too: he looked up at us expectantly; he wagged his tail. But the shelter staff didn't approve of us. I hadn't covered our pool fence with mesh to ensure Leni wouldn't drown if he squeezed through the bars ('Do you know that more dogs drown than children?' one of the shelter staff had barked at me).
Moreover, said the shelter owner, Leni didn't like my husband. It was obvious that Leni couldn't comprehend