Is Taking Our Dogs to Work All About Us?

A friend sent me an article about taking your dog to work, which asked if this trend was really for the dog or for us.  It’s a valid enough question.  Some might say taking the dog to work helps us assuage our guilt.  Let’s face it, unless there’s a room with a handler available for the dogs to play together on a rotating basis, it can’t be much fun sitting by a desk all day with very limited space to roam. Young dogs would pose a problem. But I continue to take a positive view of this practice (see Workplace Goes to The Dogs)–at least the dog’s basic needs are being met.

The person posing the question is a daycare owner, so even though it’s a good question there’s a conflict—the implication being that we should feel really guilty about not giving our dogs enough face time with their own kind, and the solution is daycare.  Or maybe that’s just my inner cynic acting up.  Yet to take a turn in this conversation, I would like to know how people have dealt with the care and mental well-being of their dogs in lieu of paying $85 a week for three daycare sessions?  In these lean times, everyone is working to keep their jobs, which usually means longer hours with no relief for the dogs as a consequence.

Have you asked a retired or unemployed dog-owning neighbor to help out with a couple of walk sessions during the day for a few bucks?  Do you trade favors, like I’ll fix your whatever, if you’ll take my dog to the dog park for an hour a couple of times this week?  Has anyone managed to cobble together a home-based business out of this, offering to spend the day watching people’s dogs?

The blog that incited this one can be read here; I would not, however, go so far as to suggest that an hour’s play in a park is not enough, as the writer states.  I hope that we would not do to our dogs what I have seen parents do so often to their kids—booking seemingly limitless lists of activities from which they must be ferried to and fro.  A.D.D. in dogs is not something we should encourage through endless play dates.  I think we might try to draw the line at the unwitting infliction of separation anxiety in dogs(that portion of the disorder that is caused by changes in human behavior).