I have never in my life owned a dog.

I'm 22 years old and I've never had a pet dog.

No, to be more precise, no one I've ever known has owned a dog.

In fact, there aren't any dogs at all in the town I grew up in.

Not a single person owns one. Not a single person owns one and there most certainly haven't been any roaming the

street of the town either. Had it not been for the internet, I wouldn't even know

they existed or could be kept as pets.

Growing up, I asked my parents a few times about getting a dog only to have the subject

dismissed or redirected.

Each time they would squirm uncomfortably, like I was asking about sexual positions or something.

So I learned from their reluctance and awkwardness not to ask about it.

At school I had asked my friends and they had told me their parents reacted in much the same way.

Though one of them, we'll call him Jimmy, claimed to have owned a dog once for a day or so,

before his parents found out.

He had secretly brought it from an online cellar.

It was a yellow one, with doughy brown eyes. equally brought it from an online cellar.

It was a yellow one with doughy brown eyes and droopy ears.

But when his parents found out, they panicked.

They shoved the poor thing out of the house with a broom like it was diseased before taking it away and returning without it.

He said he didn't know what they did to it, but we both fell into an uneasy silence as we come to the same conclusions about

what could have happened.

For a while after that, I forgot about dogs. I stopped looking them up, and it wasn't until I started

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