Gone to the dogs. But in a good way.

I'm definitely a glass-half-empty kind of guy. So it takes a real effort sometimes to drag my head up out of the low-lying miasma of bad news and appreciate how good I have it.

Today was one of those days I was able to pull that off. I live in a nice residential neighbourhood right downtown, three blocks away from a world heritage site (the Rideau Canal, with all of its well-maintained NCC bike paths and recreational goodies) and five blocks from my job. In fact, my girlfriend and I both work right downtown, which means we can forgo owning a car completely.

This time last year it was touch and go, though. I was living in a sublet and trying to find an apartment in advance of Sarah's arrival from Moncton. Wouldn't have been a huge problem, ordinarily. But, you see, there's a dog.


Dogs are the Achilles heel of the renting class. All other things being equal, landlords prefer tenants with no pets. Most dogs don't bark at all hours, pee on the floor and otherwise make life difficult for the owner and neighbours. But it only takes a few bad apples to ruin it for the rest of us.

It gets all the more difficult if, like Sarah and me, you have a large dog. And even more so if it's one of those "bad" breeds--the kinds associated in popular culture with junkyards and trailer parks, skinheads and thugs and loogans. Jade is a ninety-pound might-as-well-be-purebred Rottweiler (there's something else mixed in there but everyone has a different opinion of what it might be.) Go apartment-hunting and your big slobbery Rottie lurks in the back of your mind, like a herpes infection or a DUI conviction, as your brain whirrs at a million RPM trying to peg the least-bad moment to disclose it.

When I arranged to view the apartment, there were sixteen other people interested. I've heard that landlords in Ontario actually aren't allowed to prohibit pets, but frankly I haven't bothered to verify if this is true or not. It doesn't matter what landlords can and can't do; the fact is, there is always a plausible and perfectly legal reason for why they chose to rent to one of the other prospective tenants.

In the event, I made a very good impression on the superintendent. My tendency towards obsessive preparation didn't hurt either; when I filled out the rental application I gave references for all my landlords for the past seven years. I imagine being one-half of a gainfully-employed professional couple was a plus. The one advantage renters have these days is that thanks to the manic housing boom of the oughties, pretty much everyone who qualifies for a mortgage (and many who strictly speaking don't) owns their own place. I imagine that quality tenants are hard to come by, which is why the super quickly called me back to offer me the place. Oh, and I didn't mention the dog.

When I got the lease to sign, I went over the long list of conditions, scanning for any mention of pets. I was on page three and almost out of the woods when there it was--"The tenant shall not keep any animal in the unit." Shit!

I called up the superintendent and brought up a few questions about the terms of the lease.

"It says here I can't bring bicycles in the front door. Is that negotiable? I really don't want to leave my bike outside."

"That's not a problem. Everyone here has bikes. Don't worry about it."

"Okay, great! Now, there's a bit about not making any holes in the walls. I might want to hang up some pictures, though."

"Oh, that! Pffff. Obviously you're going to hang up pictures. You realize this is just a stock, off-the-shelf lease, right?"

"Of course! Obviously. Just one other thing, then. It says no pets, but actually we do have a dog."

Silence. The long, awkward kind.

"What... kind of dog?"

Eventually we smoothed it over. I explained that Jade is very nice (true enough) and had had about three thousand dollars worth of obedience training. That last point was very clever as, although indisputably true, it said absolutely nothing about the results of all that obedience training.

It also helped that the superintendent was going out of town the next day for two weeks and wanted this stuff over and done with. He went to bat with the landlord and we got the place.

It's been a year and, after an initial few months of keeping Jade under Anne Frank-level security, everyone got comfortable with a Rottie in the building. She's pretty quiet; when she barks, which is almost never, it's a single earth-shaking WOOF! and that's it. She's made her point. That's the thing about big dogs; they've got nothing to prove. It's the little ones, the ones with names like Fifi and Mister Woogums, that yap all night.



What's great about all this is that we've paved the way for others. Six months later our neighbours got a schnauzer. There's a cat on the ground floor that wasn't there before, and our downstairs neighbours have babysat a puppy a few times. And I just learned the other day that the superintendent's girlfriend is moving in with him, and she's bringing her Australian shepherd with her.

At the end of the day, our landlord realizes that there are a few types of tenants. There are stable, responsible tenants who stay for a long time. There are tenants with no children. And there are tenants with no pets. The thing is, you almost never find a tenant who's all three. Singles meet other singles and become couples; couples either get pregnant and buy a house and move out; or else they don't have kids and get pets instead. It's just the way it is. That's life.