O ut for dinner in London with her husband and two-month-old son, Gizzelle Cade noticed another woman coming into the restaurant with a pram. “It had all these little trinkets and toys,” says Cade. “I was like, wow, she put some cute little decor there.” The woman reached into the pram to get, Cade assumed, her baby – instead she pulled out a dog. Then she put an absorbent pad, the kind you use for puppy training, on the floor and placed the dachshund on it.
“I was completely taken aback,” says Cade. “To see pretty much an open bathroom where I was dining with my newborn – it was insulting.”
Cade can’t confirm whether the dog actually used it, and a spokesperson for the restaurant, Gordon Ramsay’s Street Pizza, has said it reviewed CCTV footage and found no evidence the dog urinated or defecated in the restaurant. At the time, Cade says she complained to two waiters and the manager, who didn’t do anything. Then she confronted the woman. “The owner started to compare her dog to my son. She said: ‘Well, your baby shits and pisses. My dog needs to shit and piss too.’ She kept on comparing her dog to my newborn baby.”