One more time, with feeling

It got down to fifty-eight degrees last night, and today it's pushing ninety, what in the world guys? This is not what I was sold on when it came to winter weather. Bait-and-switch, I say. Coupled with the fact that half of the state was just on fire it feels like a pretty weird season. There are fifty palm trees per person around here, we shouldn't have to research the comparative efficiency of space heaters.

Such real problems we have, right?

We want to talk, (again, [actually, always],), about adoption. Animal adoption. Kid adoption is cool too. Adopting a new habit is cool three. Today, though, today belongs to that special task of rescuing a pup or kitt from an adverse and often life threatening situation.

There's a special appeal to altruism. It's exists in that rare category of acts that benefit both parties involved. It's the easiest path to warm and fuzzy feelings that I know of, and it doesn't take a toll on your health like some of the other methods. If you don't believe me, go give a homeless person five dollars. Sadly, it shouldn't take very long to find someone. The kicker is, though, you can't tell anyone about it, (and for the love of God don't make a post on any social media about it. I get that it may raise awareness of the problem or open a dialogue or whatever, but if you take a picture of yourself giving to someone in need and throw it up on the internet, you're just using that person as a prop), just let the feeling of helpfulness wash over you. I can guarantee you'll feel a spark of something nice in your heart.

Now imagine instead of just giving that person enough money for a meal, you could truly change their life. You could pull them up from a crappy, frightening situation and let them know that they will never have to worry about where they're going to sleep again. In fact, you'll give them a bed so cushy Queen Liz herself would ship it over to Buckingham. Imagine further that that person would become one of your dearest companions, someone to watch movies and go hiking with, someone who would only ever see you in a shining light, never focusing on your bad days when you came home from work pissed off at the traffic that night. No, this person would always be happy when you walked in the door, whether you brought dinner or not.

Imagine even further, we're going full Inception dream-level black magic here, that this radical person wasn't even a person. I think you know what I've been getting at with this whole heavy-handed metaphor. No, this person isn't a person, but a creature of an arguably more desirable sort. Because let's face it, providing for and living with a person is expensive and often awful. People are weird. People are gross. People have weird habits when no one is watching. People put the toilet paper roll going the wrong direction and don't wipe their feet on the rug. Dogs don't wipe their feet either but they also don't complain about having to do their taxes.

So to come back to the metaphor for a moment, there are two options in procuring a person to come live with you. You can contact the Belgian Royal Archives, get a write-up on the heredity of your person, make sure that they are pure Belgian, pay hundreds to thousands of dollars in fees, and you're good to go. I mean, the mechanism of keeping them of pure Belgian blood is rampant in-breeding, leading to extreme susceptibility to certain diseases and certain body parts being grossly ineffective, inverted, or worse, but it's ok because they have that lovely Belgian aesthetic. If you decide not to go with this one, they'll hang out in a mansion until someone else comes along.

Or you can go down to the slums and choose to help someone that really needs it. They'll most likely need a shower and a haircut, (but you know a place), but they're just as good of a person as someone from the Belgian monarchy. And they aren't going to have to have their entire spine replaced in five years.

If this hasn't been made clear, we think if you're looking to get a dog, it's best to adopt. Not only are you rescuing them from a likely shortened life in the shelter or on the streets, but it's also way cheaper. In fact, it's sometimes free, (which actually isn't the best idea for shelters to do, but that's a topic for another time.) Being involved in the pet industry, we see a ton of terrible circumstances that are the result of over-breeding. It sucks. Even though we disagree with buying dogs from breeders, they are still good dogs. They don't deserve to be born with the genetic dispositions to fall apart in specific, manufactured, and painful maladies.

Would you buy a sports car that's going to break your bank account in half if you knew the transmission was going to fall out of it after 30,000 miles? Would you get a brand new Range Rover with a deformed exhaust system just because it was pretty? These are poor financial decisions, yeah, but when you bring the analogy into what I've been crowing about for these last few pages it has the added benefit of affecting actual, breathing, bleeding, heart-beating lives.

I'm done rambling. I know this is a topic we'll revisit pretty frequently, so I hope you're ready to be typed at repeatedly about it. Stay cool, and keep your pets out of those Valentine's chocolates.