Should dogs be allowed in the kitchen?
Until you pay my mortgage, don't tell me where my dog is allowed to go in my home ... with two exceptions
When I first saw this Instagram dog post about Maui (lovely name, beautiful island) blocking her dog owner Limda in the kitchen, I immediately grinned. I thought about my Lab mix Shep, who made himself at home on the third step of our basement stairway. It was the first step that curved into a diagonal from the upstairs door to the floor. And he was determined that we check in like rappers in a new city. If we were walking up the steps, he ran in front of us to make sure we petted him before continuing to climb. If we were walking down the stairs, he laid completely flat so we had to hop over him.
Spoiled as it may be, we never had any ankle injuries or tripped over him. He did it the entire 13 years if he wasn’t outside or upstairs with us. By the time he passed away, it took major practice to even walk on that step. We’d been “trained” to avoid that step. I still have a habit of climbing up two steps because of it, and he died two decades ago.
While I was reliving my fun memories of Shep and enjoying this post, one comment rubbed me the wrong way from an Instagram user (with no pictures of a dog to prove she even owns one): “It's cute and all and I love dogs ..but dogs shouldn't be allowed in the kitchen no matter how clean u feel they are.”
My immediate response: “Correction: YOUR DOG should not be allowed in the kitchen. Until you pay the mortgage or rent for the rest of us, YOUR rules only control your house. I have had three dogs over the span of 25 years. Zero problems with their water and food dish in my kitchen.”
Studio apartment dwellers, using this logic, I guess you all are banned from having pets. But let’s set studio tenants aside for the next point: maintenance.
From a cleaning perspective, it’s easier to spot spilled food and wipe up water on ceramic kitchen tiles and marble kitchen floors than it would be on carpeted floors or (in my case) laminate floors. With laminate floors, too much moisture will make the material bubble up. And dog mats on carpet can too easily scoot or not lay flat.
Granted, my first two dogs’ main water and food dishes were on basement concrete floors. We would just leave the basement door open so they could come up and down the steps as they pleased. (Note: The basement door was connected to the kitchen.) But my parents’ current dog has a water and food dish in the kitchen. Same goes for my own condo. Again, laminate floors. Even when I water my hanging plants, I put down a patch of artificial turf grass to catch water that may leak from the coco fiber liner. A dog sloppily drinking water dries in minutes on a kitchen floor.
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Another user chimed in to lecture pet owners about dog hair being in all of our food. What?! Even if I exclude my own short-haired dog (who is a sneaky shedder) and my parents’ hypoallergenic dog (who doesn’t shed at all) and focus on my first two dogs (a Lab mix and a German Shepherd), in 25 pet-owning years, I cannot recall one piece of dog hair in my food. Have I ever found my own hair in my food? Guilty. I’m not wearing a satin cloth/hair net and apron every time I cook. They’re basically decoration in my closet or for nightwear only. Are the Dog Kitchen Police wearing hair nets?
And when I count off all the dogsitting and dogboarding jobs I’ve had, pretty much every household I can think of had the dog dishes in the kitchen. I saw no dog hair nor was any in my food. Why? Basic cleaning.
Additionally, many of those homes had dog and cat doors, so the pets could come in and out of the home as they pleased. If you move that doggy door out of the kitchen, where else is it supposed to go? Entryways are almost always in the living room or the kitchen.
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I brush my short-haired dog once a week at the same time I do a complete cleanup on Sweeper Sundays. Even if you’re not spending money on a professional groomer or using a self-serving groomer space, just keeping your dog’s fur at a maintainable length certainly helps. (Clip your dog’s nails and brush their teeth while you’re at it.)
Recommended Read: “Self-cleaning oven vs your dog ~ Should pet owners hand-wash or use the self-clean feature?”
The two no-dogs-in-kitchen exceptions
Regardless of all the logical reasons I can think of to allow dogs in the kitchen, there was one consistent argument that made me pause: clumsiness. Although my own dog will patiently sit or lay by the kitchen entryway on occasion, about 85% of the time, she jumps on a couch to stare at me while I cook. (I think she’s trying to be funny. A smoke detector went off a couple of times a year or two ago, and I believe she’s clowning my cooking skills.)
Recommended Read: “My dog, the cooking critic ~ How the smoke alarm has forever made my dog skeptical of my cooking”
But for clumsy cooks who may be at risk of spilling boiling water or dropping a knife, I can see why a pet-less kitchen makes sense.
Then there’s a second reason I didn’t see come up. While I was busy giving a counterargument to the Dog Karens (yes, they can be of any race) of Instagram, I recalled another memory — of my father seasoning and preparing a platter of meat to BBQ. He turned around for one second, and my Lab mix was tall enough to leap near the counter and steal a porkchop. Before my father could catch him, he’d run outside to eat his new meal — sprinkled with toxic seasoning.