The fact that you included a disclaimer that you love dogs puts you way into the "really probably should own Dog's Life" category. Judged solely as an adventure game, it can stray into gratingly repetitive territory as you're aimlessly wandering around searching for your 115th elusive bone or 200th 'smell', but from the standpoint of a canine simulator, it's fantastic stuff.
It stops just short of being GTA or Spiderman-2-web-slinging sandbox type fun, but regardless I spent more time than I probably should have running around in circles, tossing rubber balls around just to fetch them myself, jumping into ponds to see if I could land on ducks, and pooping down steep hills.
The IK system Frontier developed and utilized for the dog animations is in itself quite impressive -- have a look at
the downloadable pc demo for a taste.
I'd have a hard time giving a glowing recommendation to the mainstream set, but to those that can appreciate charming and loveably flawed games that are doing something a bit different, I will say that it's one of the few games this year that I've been compelled to 100% complete.
And on top of all that, it's totally punk rock:
