Think On This: are you ready to open your life to a small creature that will cry pitifully, pee constantly, spew food, require a sitter and often run up extensive medical bills? If you can face all that, you are ready — not for a baby but a puppy.

Indeed, a baby and a puppy have many things in common, except that you can’t stick a baby in the basement with an old blanket overnight.

That you can do with a puppy. For perhaps 15 minutes, until softer hearts prevail. I have been through any number of puppies and have started some of them well below stairs, and they have all made it to an upstairs bedroom on the very first night. Not, let me stress, my bedroom.

I write with expertise on the topic of puppies because in the past couple of weeks the “hell puppy” has entered my life. One of those terriers that look as if they were wearing hand-me-down skin several sizes too large. One of those dogs that you can rent out to offices that need a paper shredder. (As I write, I’m referring to notes covered with kibble and chewed at the edges. Fished out from under the sofa.)

The hell puppy is cute and sensitive. If you object to the load of poop on your shoe, the hell puppy vanishes and there is a hunt under every piece of furniture because the hell puppy does not like criticism. There is rejoicing when the hell puppy is dredged from a closet, and he rewards you by peeing on your shoe. Then you raise your voice and the whole cycle repeats.

I do believe that all puppies are hell puppies, and I am often astonished that so many grow into mature and responsible dogs. For example, we have a staid, older, mostly Lab dog that was once a hell puppy. Her chief accomplishment at four months was to escape unnoticed from the house, thread her way across a large and overgrown field and burst happily into a backyard where three small children were playing.

That hell puppy thought she was bringing joy and rapture. But the small children saw her as a wolf or coyote and climbed to the top of their swing set and called for their mother. Instead, they got me, who apologized to every person who had responded to the screams. Then, I tucked the hell puppy under my arm and carried her off.

Before that hell puppy, we had another with many scalps attached to her collar in her formative months. Her chief moment of destruction was to escape from a locked kitchen, scamper over a white carpet, climb on a white sofa and scatter perhaps 40 pots of seedlings sitting on the windowsill. Many hell puppies would have called that a good night’s work. This one continued on, chewed a hole in a screen, pushed her way outside, crept along the window ledge and dropped five feet to the ground.

And before that, there was a notable hell puppy who ate Styrofoam and also the heads of the little tin players on one of those table-hockey games. I know this puppy ate the Styrofoam because one day, when I was clearing an excess of puppy poop from out back on the snow, I noticed some of the poops were floating as I lofted them towards my neighbour’s fence.

I batted one down, cracked it open and it was pure white foam inside. Pure white save for the head of Guy Lafleur.

The stories of hell puppies can roll on without end, and even as I write this upstairs — where I have barricaded myself in by placing a board across the stairs — I can hear the current hell puppy trying to force two mature, 100-pound dogs away from their food. And the hell puppy seems to be making progress because these dogs have some sense that once upon a time they too were hell puppies.

And you may be wondering if I tripped over that board in the stairway. You’re damn right I did. IE