I’m a dog person. Cats are just too bitchy for my liking. I never really realized how much of a dog person I am until I got to college, a.k.a. the time when you learn how freaky you actually are. My family has always had at least one dog. My parents bought the first one from the pound when they were just married and named her Cheese Whiz the Bat Dog. (Good one, crazy newlywed parents.) After Whiz, we had Hank, who was a German shorthaired pointer with way too much energy. Now we’ve got Delilah, a yellow lab, and Nutmeg, a cavalier king charles spaniel and the best dog you will ever meet. She’s almost eight and a half, but she’s been deaf for almost three years now. It doesn’t matter because she wouldn’t come anyway; she likes sitting and sleeping too much.

I wanted to tell you about my dog history so that you’d be able to understand how heartbroken I was when I readthis story about how inbred and unhealthy some “designer dogs” are in Japan. Breeders are inbreeding their dogs to produce more popular traits and to make the dogs smaller. The dogs are adorable, yes, but they’re so unhealthy that they sometimes collapse and die when they’re only two or three years old. Sometimes they’re born all deformed and the breeders leave them to die.

Awwww. Sadface. I feel like I’m one of those mildly irritating people in the Arbor lobbying for you to sign some thing or another to help kids in [insert developing nation here]. And really, I’m not sure why I thought it was a good idea to start the week off on such a mopey note, other than I saw this story and felt like it was important for you kids to know. If you get a dog – do you really have enough time to raise a puppy, busy college student? – make sure it looks more like this. Not this.