The Truth About Cats And Dogs And Me
A dog moved in next door. Ok, a couple of girls with a dog moved in next door. If it was an actual family of dogs that moved in, it would have been even more concerning. However, when I signed my lease for this apartment, it was under the condition that there were no dogs allowed. So, if I’m considering moving out, does this make me a bad person? I have a complicated relationship with the concept of pets. Maybe that is why my sanctuary’s borders feel violated.
I had gerbils when I was younger. They are awful little creatures that currently have a stigma attached to them that seems undeserved. The concept of gerbils crawling up a rectum as pleasurable seems more urban myth than fact. Actually, gerbils are quite horrible. Nocturnal creatures that turd every few seconds and make an ungodly amount of noise while humans sleep. I can not recall why I subjected myself to this torture, but I consider it my moment of self-loathing as a youth. A gerbil as a pet is the equivalent of decorating your house in garbage – it is your own damn fault if it depresses you.
By the end of my gerbil period, I had witnessed the carnage of dozens of gerbils involved in cannibalistic activities. It was my fault. When you place the gerbil cages in the bathroom because gerbils apparently don’t believe in family planning, trouble ensues. They hump so often that they quickly turn into a village before you have a chance to relate to one. In an embarrassing display of pet ownership, I had forgotten that I had gerbils while I tried to get some sleep. No more running around on the wheel, no more rattling the water bottle, and no more scratching endlessly in the corner of the urine-soaked, cedar shaving lined aquarium. The reason was unflattering. I had accidentally turned my gerbil nation into a killing field because I needed more REM sleep. It wasn’t purposeful, it was accidental. It made me feel like a bad person. Animals need lots of attention. And you need to give it to them 24 hours a day – even while you should be sleeping.
Cole was a funny little dog. Light on personality, but extremely good looking. For much of his life, he slept on my bed on my size 12 feet. I found that cute at first and then quickly grew tired of the interruption to my sleep patterns. When I started to push Cole off of my futon bed, he would pee on the floor. In fact, Cole would pee and poop on the floor a lot. A skittish dog purchased from a pet store that never really seemed to get over the horrors of that store. A thunderstorm meant instant evacuation. A strong wind might result in a pee. The sound of a truck backing up might result in vomit. Suddenly, my cute little buddy seemed like a walking pot of bodily fluids splashing around with every move. I would wake up to a surprise every morning. Cole was like a grandpa that needed to pee in the middle of night, but somehow couldn’t open the bathroom door with his paws.
When I went golfing, it would be a 6 hour stretch away from home on a Saturday. If I had a beer afterwards, it could turn into 10 hours really quickly. Imagine not going to the bathroom for 10 hours. Ouch. That is a tester for any man – especially after those beers. I would return to my house to the pained expression of a terrorized dog and a pile of poo that would grow every few hours. I would feel like a bad person – especially if I had sliced into the woods on the 15th hole and submarined my round because I was concerned about the prospects of my return home.
There is no better example that we learn about the cycle of life than pet ownership. So many pets breeze through our lives and they become markers of the passage of time. From Anka to Dax to Kai to birdie to kitten to the turtles, gerbils, guinea pigs, tropical fish, and the lizards – I have experienced them all. Each fish stuck in the filter floating upside down with one eye plucked out felt like a personal attack on my sensitivities. Can you imagine seeing a family friend die choking on a potato? I did. That guinea pig didn’t last very long when my Dad decided to feed it leftovers. My poor little friend Cole died of a rectal tumor. During the final weeks, it was a bloody mess that was the equivalent of witnessing a Manson murder. I had a tropical fish in college that ate every fish that I would put into the tank. In fact, I would buy fish that I had to feed this fish. It was hard for me – I don’t love seeing fish ripping apart fish. It is not my idea of a good time. Then again, some people like Monster truck races – so maybe I just can’t relate. After feeding that fish hundreds of fish, it grew to the size of a salmon. Then one day, it jumped out of the tank and died on the floor. It was so big that I couldn’t flush it down the toilet. I couldn’t even find a place in West Philadelphia to properly bury it. It ended up in the trash – much like a spoiled fish that you’d get from Reading Terminal Market. All of that effort for such an ungracious ending.
We had a dog named Kai. An enormous black German shepherd that seems out of step with the rest of the world. Maybe Kai was complicated or maybe Kai was better suited for the job as guard at a concentration camp – either way, it was the scariest figure of my youth. Wake up in the morning, walk down stairs for breakfast, get attacked by family dog, clean wounds, go down back stairs to sneak out of the house, and leave house shaking. I remember seeing Kai chase our little annoying French neighbor across the yard. She could run pretty fast for a 70 year old lady. Kai had an amazing knack for making even the largest and most intimidating person melt with fear. Seeing our post man hiding on top of our car cornered by that dog was funny at the time. It was no way to live.
Kai made me question whether or not animals could really grow to love humans, or whether it was all about the food. If a shark keeps coming around and trying to get some attention from me, I wouldn’t really question his motivation. However, dogs have this manipulative way of appearing sweet and innocent while they are begging for food that we can’t resist. Head on the lap. The eyes of sweet innocence. Give me a Snausage, please. When the gravy train appears to have stopped running, the dog is asleep and farting in the corner without a care in the world. I hope that my houseguests at my next dinner party don’t behave this way after the meal. The dog ends up getting the food. They always do. In the wild, a wolf doesn’t wait for dinnertime to kill the rabbit. It is an all day affair. We think that a wolf is a grumpy dog. But maybe a domesticated dog is just a smoother operator. He doesn’t have to chase the prey through the forest. He licks your face and gets satisfied. The end result is the same. It is an economic arrangement that the wolf never figured out.
When my need to have a pet chameleon was satisfied, the allure lasted a day. A lizard is a cool looking animal. When I went the St. Barth’s and realized that a gecko was something that you wanted to beat with a broom, I looked back at my experience with the chameleons with bewilderment. I would take earthworms with tweezers and feed them to the lazy little creature. This was not the economy of dog ownership. After indulging in the earthworm, the chameleon would disappear under a rock never to be seen again until the next session. It felt a bit like throwing a quarter to a homeless guy so that he could buy another bottle of Wild Turkey and hide in the shadows. I remember less about the chameleon than the earthworms. I spent more time with them – as I pushed them from the plank. If the earthworm had a pink tongue and more visible eyes would I let him sleep on my futon at my feet. It seems so random. While I don’t want to see the guy walking his earthworm around Rittenhouse Square, I’d like to know why waking up every morning to pick up my animal’s poop off of the sidewalk is any more satisfying than briefly saying hello to a wriggling pet on a tweezers about to be eaten by his slothful counterpart.
I walk through the city amazed at the dogs that I see. Imagine a city apartment with a Great Dane? A pit bull? I cross the street when I see them. Tell me that it is the dog, not the owner over and over again. My leg looks like a chicken wing to the dog either way. In the same way that I won’t overanalyze a potential mugger’s early upbringing while I’m trying to escape, the nature vs. nurture argument seems meaningless while I’m trying to pry my leg out of Rover’s mouth. And let’s not forget those little sweaters and hats that people like to put on their pets. No offense, but if humiliation is part of the economic arrangement between dogs and man, I submit that we should just set them free. When I pass the pet store on 13th street and see that array of sweaters, funny collars, etc. I’m reminded that Paris Hilton’s pets are just purses with a pulse. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s had their digestive systems surgically removed because you can’t mess up the Bentley because of a shitting purse. It is amazing how we will judge another human being by the way that they look. How on earth can someone wear white shoes after Labor day? At the same time, your Chihuahua looks so cute dressed up like a leprechaun seems normal. Even Cinco de Mayo isn’t a good excuse to humiliate your pets.
It is amazing how often people talk about their pets. I’m never at a loss for conversation. The potential for conversation seems endless. And yet, I find myself in an endless number of conversations about pets and I don’t have one. It feels like a crutch. It has all of the appeal of asking about the weather when there is an awkward pause in conversation. And the stories seems so amazing or heroic to the owner, but seem so silly to me. If every story about our pets was true, then we have a subculture of superheroes amongst us. Maybe people want to believe in something so badly that they’ll assign amazing feats to their pets that never really happen. “My dog jumped up and alerted us to the incident across the street and saved our lives.” I’m a light sleeper too but I never get away with pooping on the floor. “Fluffy can sense that we are going on vacation, isn’t it amazing how they know?” Yes, when you are busily preparing for your trip and haven’t fed the dog all day, they get a little Kreskin on you. “When grandma died, the only person that understood my pain was my Pekinese.” Crying and screaming at your pet can result in another turd or the feeling like some extra portions are coming with the next meal.
My brother has had a long history of owning parrots. I have had a hate-hate relationship with them. They are loud, dirty, and over-rated as companions. We think that a parrot is a smart animal. “Polly wants a cracker” can be achieved by endlessly torturing your parrot by repeating the same words to it for years. We wouldn’t treat the criminally insane this way. Parrots are given the same respect as Manuel Noriega as we drove him insane with heavy metal music pumped into his compound. How smart can a parrot be when it ends up stuck in a cage only three times its size and sits on a pole all day while crapping on the newspaper. I’ll admit that dogs have created a smarter economic arrangement. But birds are a classic example of our inconsistency when it comes to pets. Pigeons are universally loathed by most people. Rats with wings, they say. You can throw a bottle cap at a pigeon and it will take a few minutes for it to realize that it isn’t food. However, if you put a pigeon in a cage and hand fed it – most owners would say that they have a brilliant pigeon and understand that loving gesture of being given a prison like home environment with a mirror, a cuttle stone, and a water dish filled with poo. On my ride to work when the pigeon that I was about to run over flew up and hit me in the face, I didn’t scream back at the bird and tell him how brilliant he was.
Birds are just birds. A glorious part of the chain. A chain so brilliantly conceived that we revel in its wonders each day. For some reason, I don’t think that ownership of animals was part of the magical layout. While I’m sure that examples exist, my dog never owned a pet squirrel. You won’t see most animals in the wild with pets. They tend to eat them. Even the little fish that swims under the shark seems more nuisance than pet. The shark never even considers dressing that fish up like a leprechaun. It is an arrangement. You eat stuff off of me and I don’t kill you. It is a simple version of the Human-Pet arrangement. Every night on the local news, you’ll hear a story of a guy who stuffs a woman in his basement and never lets her out. When guests used to come to my house as a kid, we put the dog away because it couldn’t be trusted with the new people. My gerbils wanted out. I know that they did. If gerbils could speak, they would have unionized. Or felt like they needed to be freedom fighters. It was no way to sleep. Prisoners are given a gym and a meal. My gerbils were prisoners with an exercise wheel, pellets, a water bowl, and the joy of sleeping in their own feces. I closed my own Guantanemo one day while I was younger and have resisted opening a new one ever since. But I have, it is a pressure in our society. Ghandi said that we are measured by how we treat our animals, they say. But am I a bad person if I want the animals to live as they were intended to be. Maybe mine is the more humane view. After all, I don’t drink out of a water bowl filled with my own poo and I never exercise on a wheel to nowhere.
I love animals. Animal planet is fun to watch. I’ve always been fascinated by seeing a great animal in the wild. On TV of course, because I get rashes easily in the bush. And who the heck has time for all of that hiking. But I’ve never had the need to be squirted on by a killer whale. In fact, I’ve been on a personal crusade to keep people from spitting in Market East, so the thought of going on vacation to have a large sea mammal spit on me is obscene. How many trainers need to die while teaching Shamu to be cute before we understand that it is the same as driving your parrot insane so that you can giggle with friends about him dropping the F-bomb at a dinner party. Essentially, we are dressing Shamu up like a leprechaun and raising him in a pool to slowly go insane like the rest of our pets.
Man has this thing about mastering his domain. We move to the country and try to make it look like the city. We plant flowers and then shoot deer for eating them. We revel in the crazy cuts of meat that we can ingest but complain to the neighbors when their dog pees on our sod. We will hunt down wild game with our rifles and then sue the neighbors when their dog chases our cat into the street. We cut our grass and neuter our pets. Taming the wild is so much fun that we never consider how awful the life of a spitting Killer Whale might be. When Howard Hughes never left his apartment, he was saving urine in bottles and going completely mad. But we never consider that a killer whale subjected to the torture and humiliation of a regular job entertaining us might be cruel beyond imagination. This is one of the kings of the ocean. It has few enemies. It roams freely at will much like a human being on land. How important to science is it that know that a Killer Whale can be humiliated to the point of being a pigeon in the park trying to eat a bottle cap.
I don’t believe that owning a pet is like having a child. I can’t wait to have children. Changing a diaper does not scare me because I know that it will eventually stop. It is a complicated business to raise a child. Every day will unfold with a new worry and a new travail. The satisfaction of bringing a child into this world and watching them do great, not-so-great, and forgettable things is exciting. Putting on a plastic glove each day for the entire life of a dog countless times to pick up their poop reminds me of chasing a tail that you never catch. In an insane asylum. Relationships are more complex than a one-sided arrangement where you get it all. The pet-owner relationship is on tilt. The parrot looks for the open window even if you buy it a new mirror. When you give your dog to the SPCA, it is either killed or finds a new owner. It will love them too. Especially if they feed them the good stuff. It isn’t really unconditional love as much as unconditional hunger. The killer whale kills the trainer because he’s big, trapped, and hungry. You can try to unlock the puzzle, but it doesn’t matter. He’s right and we are wrong. His behavior is as it should be. A crazy person who writes on the walls with crayons with his toes is easily forgiven and not scolded for being insane. They are just insane with the hand that they are dealt. My gerbils ate one another because they were hungry. They didn’t care if I could sleep or not because they were in a cage and behavior like they would in the chain. Nocturnal creatures creates have a tendency to stay up late. It is just one of those things.
I saw a turtle the other day in a store. It was being sold as a pet. Down the street, I saw a basket of turtles sitting near an exhaust pipe on the sidewalk in Chinatown ready to be eaten. Pets aren’t like kids. We don’t eat our kids. That was one lucky turtle that was kept from that fate. What a fine line it is between the joys of petdom and being an appetizer. For some reason, I look at a canary in a pet shop and the image of a Chicken McNugget flashes in my mind. I’m a vegetarian now but I did always love McNuggets. Please don’t think of your kids as McDonalds products. It isn’t healthy. By nature, we are similar to the shark – we are looking for food all day. We consume a lot of things. Pets are part of that need to consume or attain. I want to show off my pet and will endure making it miserable so that I can show him off. In the end, it is never about the pet’s life. Sitting in a basket on the curb and sitting in an aquarium are much the same in the pet world. But what is in it for the turtle?
As I sit in my chair and hear the barking of the dog next door, I can’t help but think of Cole. He sat alone for 10 hours with the threat of being scolded for going to the bathroom on the floor. He shivered and quaked whenever a truck would go down the street. His natural instinct to eat at will was molded to my schedule. I would leave and he was sitting at the door. I would come back and see him sitting in the window waiting for my return. It seemed sweet at the time. But he was really hungry and needed to take a shit, and I was keeping him from it with my ridiculous regime of mind-bending rules and regulations. We aren’t rational with our pets. We are tyrants. Sick of being controlled in our own lives, so that we can squire over something. Anything. Even a turtle. We rail against the man, the government, and foreign influences. But we think nothing of putting a ferret in a cage and wondering why is so jumpy.
The dog across the hall is making my life less sane. We are going down together. I feel great empathy for him. I’m sure that life isn’t easy when you can’t pee at will. But you know-that madness wasn’t part of my lease. I didn’t sign up for this. So it is time to renegotiate. This economic arrangement isn’t working for me. I need a new mirror in my cage.