My Dad. We've always had a dog or three. I tried not having a dog once. I lasted a month. It was awful. DH never saw me, I spent all my time torturing my mum and dad with my parents dogs. In the end I broke down in drunken snotty tears and told DH how miserable I was and how much I hated being in a house with no dog. I may have told him I was leaving(we'd just moved and he didn't want a dog messing up his shiny, new house, my previous dog had passed away the week we were moving). This was the Friday night. Saturday we went to the dog pound, Sunday our dog came home. Then I accidentally acquired a couple more.
My Dad raised us to be interested in animal welfare. He was always bringing home stray dogs, injured wildlife and unwanted or neglected exotic birds. I shared my bedroom with a sick pigeon or blackbird many a night. The seagull was, erm, interesting. We were known as the go to family if you had a pet you no longer wanted or found sick wildlife. I spent my childhood nursing abandoned baby birds or bringing neglected pets back to full health.
There was a time we had three rabbits, two guinea pigs, two ferrets, a couple of rats, an aivery, three parrots, two cockatiels, two dogs, two cats and a pigeon loft, but it was always the dogs who interested me most.
Meeting my dog in the pound and reading up on MN got me more interested in the official rescue side of things, discovering my poor ex poundie had many, many behavioural issues got me interesting in training and behaviour which soon became a slight obsession and is new the subject of my new degree course.