Keeping Your Home From Going to the Dogs

Meghan Cox Gurdon shares the difficulties in trying to keep one's home free of pets.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Meghan Cox Gurdon shares the difficulties in trying to keep one's home free of pets.

The ancient city of Babylon had walls so thick, they couldn't be breached. Ha-ha, the Babylonians could yell down at would-be invaders. No conquest for you!

Alas for the Babylonians, their fortified city had a weakness: The Euphrates River ran under its walls. Spotting this vulnerability, the wily Persian king Cyrus waited until the Babylonians were distracted, diverted the river, and sent his armies marching in through the drained riverbed. Impregnable Babylon fell.

That scenario, give or take two-and-a-half thousand years and minus the armies, is exactly what took place recently in a suburban house not far from here.

It was a dwelling fortified against dog ownership. It was a house whose younger occupants had been made to understand that however nice dogs are -- and goodness knows, dogs are nice -- there would be no dog of any size, no matter how charming, for the time being or the medium term or whichever is longer.

"We are not getting a dog," said the parents of this Babylonian household.

Alas, their fortified suburban walls concealed a fatal weakness. It was not the Euphrates River. It was the word "dog."

That word covers an abundance of animals: long-haired and short-haired, frisky and placid, hounds and terriers and retrievers. What it doesn't cover -- and here's the riverine weak point -- is the multitude of other creatures that any child, if given half a chance, will try to import.

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