I love dogs and I have two pet rats, but that's exactly what they are - pets. It bothers me when people treat their pets like children or spoil them. It weirds me out when pet owners call themselves mommies and daddies and call their pets furbabies.

My two rats are low maintenance, we left them alone for four days with a bunch of food and water for Christmas and they were fine. We let them run around the living room once a day if we can, if not, it's not the biggest deal in the world. When we were gone for a week we just asked someone to check in on their food levels every few days and they were fine.

I grew up with a Rottweiler as the family dog. He was considered a member of the family, but that was a specific role of the family dog. Not a child or anything. He was disciplined and loved, and he knew his place.

I had a friend who adopted a dog. I thought she was a cute dog. When he moved to the state I live in and I was around him in person, I realized how much the dog absolutely dominated his life. He and his dog were exactly like your friend and her dog. He almost always brought his dog everywhere. Like, maybe once or twice he left her at home. Activities were limited to places that allowed dogs, a.k.a. dog parks or sitting in the apartment. Even worse than that, she was a bad dog and he did little to discipline her. She humped people, marked her territory all the time on walks, snatched food from anywhere (including your hands,) growled and barked at children, lost her shit when she was alone, jumped wherever she wanted, and so on. I grew to resent the dog.

On the one time we left her alone in my boyfriend's apartment when we all went to get sushi, when we came back we saw she knocked over a bunch of my potted plants and broke my little jalapeno's pot. I cried. God damn. He eventually bought me a new pot though. He drew a picture on it with his dog's face and "I'm sowwy" and all I could think was "no she's not and she's not fucking cute either."

We were actually thinking of moving in together, my boyfriend, him, and I, but after finding out how much of a spoiled, untrained, pain-in-the-ass the dog was, we just couldn't deal with it. Our friend was like a parent, but with a dog. We used to joke about it, but it sucked because he is a really good friend. He moved to a different state, we still keep in touch, but I'm honestly glad to not have to deal with his dog anymore.