This, but actually I’m quite allergic so this is all a fantasy anyway, so let’s pretend I’d be fine picking up dog shit every day for the next decade and say that I’d like a boxer or staffy named Doug.
Basically cats are the best, but if there’s a dog about I’d give it attention but dogs are just a bit dull at the end of the day. You have to pick up their shit, and as said above a dog is a massive commitment. You can just leave a cat for a week and have your neighbor feed it and it’ll be fine. A dog would go mad though.
Some people I lived with for a few months got a boxer puppy just as we were all moving out. Lovely dog, but they hadn’t quite nailed the toilet training yet. Good thing there were wooden floors really.
I used to spend a lot of time with an incredibly stupid dalmatian growing up. (Didn’t belong to my family, belonged to a family friend who used to do a lot of childcare).
Dalmatians are famously dense anyway, but this dog was possibly the stupidest going. He was very loveable though, so it didn’t matter so much that he couldn’t learn any commands and had flummoxed several dog trainers, and would try to get on your lap when he was huge, and regularly got stuck behind furniture and howled to be rescued.
The lady who owned the racoon was as mad as a box of frogs, no spoils but there’s a bit where she took it into Hamleys to get some toddler development toys
Oh and also killed a duck at the park once mostly by scaring it to death by being too excited, which was mortifying for the owners, and I think they had to pay some kind of fine.