“Dear Sean,” the letter began, “there’s a dog in my neighborhood who was lost and followed me home.

“We think he is an Irish Setter. Mom says I can have him but that I should ask you because its a lot of responsibility for a 10-year-old to have a dog.”

The letter was signed Ellen.

Dear Ellen, first off, your mother is right. Having a dog is a huge responsibility. I should know. I have three huge responsibilities.

My dogs are: Thelma Lou (bloodhound) and Otis Campbell (alleged Labrador). My third dog is Marigold, the blind coonhound who is 60 pounds. They are all curled at my feet right now as I write this column.

A typical day with dogs goes like this: You wake up. You feed your dogs. Then you let them all outside to go pee. Then you let them back inside. Then outside again. Then in. Out. In.

After which you will attempt to go about your day. You will get maybe 3 minutes into your work routine before there is a violent scratching at your back door, which is the sound of a 90-pound responsibility alerting you that you need to open the door and let your responsibility out to go pee again.

So, even though there is a doggy door installed in this door, a door which took roughly eight hours to install because the instructions were printed in French, Swahili, and Pig Latin, your dog still wants YOU to open the door because, by in large, some dogs have the intelligence of—I am not being negative here—Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

This scratching will not stop until you open the door. The scratching never stops. After they bury you, you will hear scratching on your tombstone.

Dogs can be strange creatures. One of my dogs, for example, loves cattle bones. So we give her lots of cattle femurs which can be purchased from your local pet store for about the same price as a nuclear aircraft carrier.

Every time I give my dog a bone she promptly carries the bone into the backyard and digs a hole, drops the bone into the hole, then covers it by kicking dirt, whereupon, she forgets about the bone for the rest of her lifetime.

We have 132,028 bones in our backyard. Sometimes we save time by buying a bag of cattle femurs then throwing them directly into the trash. This is part of dog ownership.

Dogs are also bad about barking when postal carriers come to your door. All three of my dogs bark at a volume loud enough to alter the weather, jumping on walls, salivating, and just generally going bat-excrement insane.

This is because my dogs are defending our house from Bad Guys. They are constantly on the lookout for Bad Guys. If ever a serial killer came to our house, my dogs would bark loudly until the door opened, then heroically charge past him looking for Bad Guys.

So anyway, I could go on and on about dog ownership, Ellen. But I’m out of room here.

I’ll simply end by saying this: There is no feeling on earth like having three huge responsibilities curled up at your feet as you write your column.

Good luck.