Two-thirds of people would dump a partner or forgo a second date if their dog or cat didn’t like the person, according to a poll by Pets at Home.
Single people are dumb, unless they secretly love being single, in which case they are smart, because this is a terrible test. A dog who is used to being the apple of your eye can easily take against a rival, for no better reason than they seem suitable. And you should never outsource this kind of judgment call to a cat. Cats don’t like anyone.
But a bad pet can be a good early-warning system for how a relationship will cope with adverse conditions. On about my sixth date with my first husband, I had left my dog – a staffy crossed with a rhodesian ridgeback, who would now probably be called an XL bully, but that would be wrong – and two whippets who belonged to a friend at my mother’s and gone out shopping.
Whippets, a behaviourist told me later, are notorious cheerleaders. Unlikely to bite a person themselves, they stand on the sidelines, barking at larger, stupider dogs, to encourage an attack. This is more or less what happened: my dog bit my mother.
This was not ideal, but it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if she hadn’t recently gone on blood thinners after a heart attack. So, my sixth date and I arrived at her house moments after to carnage, a proper Hammer Horror scene. Even after the shooting geyser of blood had been staunched and the wound established to be not that serious, the atmosphere still wasn’t great.
I asked my future husband later whether, had it been date one, before we had bonded (shagged), he would have run for the hills. After some pedantic follow-up questions (“Why would we have our first date at your mother’s house?” “Have you ever taken three dogs on a first date?”), he decided that yes, most likely, that would have been it. As it was, I admired his cool head under pressure and liked him even more afterwards.
The moral of this story is that you should always put out. No, wait, the moral is that a pet can be a useful positive filter in a relationship. Wrong again. The moral is: train your dog.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
