There I was, looking at my dog curled up on an expensive human chair in my living room, saying: “Why not? Why shouldn’t I buy him a dog bed from Orvis?”

So I did. But I feel like I have to explain myself.

Dog beds were, for a time, one of the punch lines about Orvis. “That’s where you go and get women’s sweaters and dog beds, not fly rods,” they said. The folks in Vermont have always made canine sleeping goods a priority. That is an undeniable, proof is in the catalog fact. Less empirical is the assessment that the quality of the fishing gear waned. Anecdotally, I use Orvis rods and reels from the last four decades, and I’m pretty content.

Just because I’m offering an apologetic for Big Fly Fishing doesn’t mean that I don’t have some feelings about Orvis dog beds.

Because I do:

I worked at an Orvis company store while I was in college. Most of my time was spent with fly fishing gear and associated activities. But women’s sweaters and Barbour jackets were part of the gig, too. As was customer service. At this point in the company’s history, they had a 100%, no questions asked, full replacement return policy. There were some gross abuses that I bore witness to. For example:

• A nylon shirt featuring a melted spot the exact shape of a hot clothes iron.
• A decade-old hat that looked like it had been retrieved from under an outhouse.
• One glove. (The other was missing, so he was dissatisfied in the product.)

People also brought dog beds back to the store. Used dog beds, as you may surmise, are rarely returned because they are clean and smell nice. Multiple times, someone brought in a black trash bag containing the remnants of a $200+ dog bed. To be fair, for $200+ dollars, I would expect a certain level of durability. But every once in a while these customers would also bring in the hyena-wolf hybrid that tore through the herringbone tweed dog duvet. Such creatures would probably be content to sleep on a pile of antelope bones. Orvis was presumably lost upon them.

One time my manager processed the return, saving a large enough scrap of the dog bed cover to place alongside pants missing a button or incorrectly monogrammed polos. He handed me the plastic bag full of the rest of the massacre and told me to take it to the dumpster. As I went to heave the load into the bin, the thin nylon tore and sent the contents airborne. The conditions were just right such that the tiny foam puffs which made up the dog bed’s insides swirled around me; the static electricity causing them to cover me in little urine-saturated balls and dander-laden hair.

So yes, I do have feelings about Orvis dog beds. But I also am quite fond of Ember. He’s a good boy. And he deserves the best. After all, he wouldn’t want me to fish with a fly rod from Amazon.