Our Dog Is Different on Instagram

He’s an adorable doggo — until he scares you half to death

Megan Morrone
Human Parts

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Photos courtesy of the author.

It started like so many dog love stories do, with a plea from a child.

“Why can’t we have a dog?” she asked as if we’d already said no, which we hadn’t, because she hadn’t asked yet.

My daughter was familiar with the word “no.” Even at the end of her first decade of life, she was already used to settling. As the well-behaved 10-year-old sister to two joyfully recalcitrant eight-year-old twin brothers, she had adjusted to a life of not asking for much. But the dog was clearly something she was willing to push for. She was all big blue eyes then, with a wheat-colored pixie cut — a haircut she’d never have again in her childhood, as she let her hair grow and grow as fast as the rest of her did. That was half a decade ago, before I worried about how we were going to pay for college tuition or whether my kids thought vaping was cool or stupid or at what point their Instagram captions had become more sardonic than my own.

“Why exactly can’t we have a dog?” my daughter asked then. “I need reasons if you guys are gonna say no.”

When we were first pregnant with her, my husband and I used to joke that we were having a baby so we could practice for having a dog. It turned out to be partly true. When…

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