Chimps with Wolves

This is the second in a series of posts about my adventures in adopting a dog. Feel free to share your own adventures and tales in the comment section, or e-mailing me.

With a little patience, resilience, luck and a whole lot of hawking Craigslist, we finally found a dog-friendly apartment in the Boston area. Just got back from signing the lease, in fact.  The place is great — right by several train stops for the girlfriend to take into work and even one that goes by my work in Newton. The drive to my day job will be about 1/4 it’s current time, but I probably end up T-ing it in and using that would-have-been gas money for the future dog. It’s also a very dog-friendly area — Brookline. It’s impossible to walk a block without running into five dogs enjoying the smells.

There’s a park nearby that has off-leash hours (albeit crappy ones if you ask me) — dawn to 9am. Who doesn’t like the play fetch at 6am? There are some other parks which hours are slightly better — dawn to 1pm. Doesn’t help getting some playtime in after work hours, but c’est la vie. I may end up taking the future dog to Somerville where there are better fenced in dog parks (vs. Brookline’s people parks that they allow dogs in). But I digress…

The place we’ll be living in didn’t list itself as dog-friendly, mostly because it wasn’t dog-friendly to tenants until we spoke with them about it. The landlords (who live in the building) have a little dog and their son (also in the building) has two dogs, but family is family, and the landlords never had anyone outside of family own a dog in the building. We met with them to look at two units and told them we didn’t have a dog but were planning on getting one in the fall and was the sole reason for leaving our current apartment (basically going with what I wrote in my last post). They said they’d consider it and talked about what they would and wouldn’t allow should they let us get a dog.

Fast forward a bit, we told the owners we wanted to move in but needed a definite yay or nay on the dog owning, and that we needed it in writing. Note: I’m the type of person that usually will take someone’s word as gold, but for something like this I needed it in writing and signed. I didn’t want to get into a situation in which we move in and then the landlords change their mind. They said sure and were completely OK with the idea of it being in writing… and, really, that’s not surprising. It’s as useful to them as it is to us — the rules and regulations all laid out so there’s no confusion on, say for example, what a “small dog” is.

Of course, they’ve never had a tenant with a dog before, so they didn’t have a Dog Agreement/Policy in place. Luckily I’m a huge dork and had started doing some research by this point. I had talked to a few of my dog-owning friends to see what their lease was like, plus perused guidelines created by the MSCPA (be sure to check out their entire “Renting with Pets” section). I had a basic idea of what the dog agreements were like. So I told them I’d draft something up and send it to them for their review.

I use friend’s tips on what it should include, added in what I liked and thought was relevant from the MSPCA guidelines, a dash of my own ideas into the policy, plus customized it with what the landlords were OK with size and breed wise (under 40lbs; no “guard dog” types, etc.). The end result was a two-page agreement (downloadable in PDF form) that covers everything from age/weight/breed/history to doggie manners to tenant’s responsibility. I tried thinking of every worry and concern the landlords would have about two strangers bringing in a strange dog into their building. I set consequences for us should we not follow through with our end of the bargain and set “goals” (i.e., taking the dog to obedience class and providing proof of it’s complete) so they know we’re doing everything we can to keep their investment (the apartment) in top shape.

If you read through it, you’ll probably won’t find anything surprising in there. It’s a lot of standard things you would expect any responsibly dog owner to do. But, I think, that’s half the point. Aside from it laying the ground rules so both parties know what’s what, it shows the landlords that we’re dedicated to being responsible dog owners and looking after their property. And for a lot of building management and land owners, that’s the root of their concern. They don’t trust the strange new tenants or their strange new dog quite yet. Blindly doing so shows a lot of faith in humanity, but trust is most definitely earned. I think my girlfriend and I were able to earn a little of that with the dog policy.

We sent the policy to them and they thought it was great. They had no changes to it (which I’ll admit I’m a bit proud of) and we signed today. Come this fall, future dog will have an actual name and I’ll be bombarding you all with pics of him/her. I’m aiming for November, which will be a test in restraint and patience for me.

I’ve uploaded my Dog Owning Agreement Policy in PDF form should you want to create your own policy and have something to go off of. It definitely helps, I find.