It’s almost certain that people who love dogs are part of a cult. You can tell they’re under a spell because they find it hard to believe that anyone doesn’t like dogs, and are utterly convinced that those sad people who say they don’t will, surely, one day see the light of saliva-saturated salvation.

You know for sure that someone’s a cult member when you mention that you, personally, don’t enjoy the company of canines and they look at you with that same mix of piety and pity that the religiously enthusiastic have in their wide, empty eyes.

“You will love dogs, you’ll see,” they chant at me, now that I’ve lost the fight against dog ownership to the three, fully barking cult members of my family.

While I knew that this new creature would lower my general enjoyment of life with its licking, barking, whining and defecating, I have been surprised at how much it’s also lowered the value of our house.

Sure, it’s probably a coincidence that prices and auction-clearance rates in our area started leaping off cliffs at the same time Daisy arrived (no, I did not vote for that name, I wanted to call her “Emasculate Me”), but what’s not in dispute is that the puppy has trashed our property.

I am constantly baffled by people who talk up the intelligence of dogs, because here is an animal that actually thinks it can chew its way through something as solid as a door and which, when it fails to do so, will attempt to do it again the next day. And the day after.

If this undeniably cute but cussedly evil cavoodle is meant to be my new best friend, how come none of my other friends have ever reduced the bottom third of my bathroom door to splinters and paint flecks?

The human ones might occasionally fall asleep in the bath naked, sure, but a horrible scare in the middle of the night does not require a handyman to repair.

Our back door is made mainly of glass, and even more so now that Daisy has chewed and scratched away the bottom of the frame, but it’s hard to see through it now, thanks to the streaky snail trails of puppy feet and claws seemingly attempting to turn the glass back into sand.

Then there’s the digging in the backyard, which is doubly annoying because, unlike a cat, the dog does not dig a hole to bury the truly alarming amount of tiny turds it produces, it just digs holes all around those fly-blown crap cakes.

Pretty soon, our tiny patch of what was grass will resemble a Tough Mudder course for cockroaches.

And don’t even get me started on the stench. I know it’s there, even though I can’t smell it, because I’m always nauseated by the whiff of it in other people’s homes. I recently went to look at a house for sale and immediately hated it because of the dog stink (and the poop they’d neglected to clean off the grass).

Incredibly, you can’t smell a dog in your own home, in the same miraculous way that you can’t smell booze on yourself but it reeks if your partner comes home inebriated.

In short, the dog has trashed the value of our house, emptied our bank account (buying a robot would have been cheaper because they never need vet visits) and made my life a stinking, sleepless misery.

Sadly the cultists I live with, and all their associates (patting strangers’ dogs while making stupid faces is their version of the Freemasons’ secret handshake) just don’t see it. And if I complain, I’m the one who ends up in the dog house.