When I see a sign on a telephone pole asking, “Have you seen my Fluffy,” with a picture of an adorable feline, I know I should feel sympathy for the owner. And when I see a posting on a local website announcing that Woofy has run off, I know I should empathize with the bereft dog owner. But I don’t. I don’t like cats or dogs.
Despite having had generations of cats in our house, I view them as pests. The chief function of cats is to shred couches and fill up stinky litter boxes. Furthermore, according to the National Institutes of Health, “free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals annually.”
As for dogs, their chief function is to slobber, bark loudly and fill up public places with poo. Ironically, if I am walking down the beach with a bevy of dog-lovers, I’m the one that the unleashed dogs select for a wet sniffing and a joyful tail-wagging. Go away!
But I don’t dislike all pets. In my younger years, my room was a small zoo.
Among my earliest pets were turtles (red-ear sliders) bought for 10 cents at the circus in the 1950s. Invariably, their shells had pictures painted on them which, if the turtles survived, warped the shells.
My first pet turtle disappeared. My parents, wanting to protect me from harsh reality, told me that it had jumped out the window. Later, I learned that my grandmother had stepped on it. These days, turtles have been identified as a source of salmonella, so they are rarely sold at pet stores, painted or otherwise.
I kept anoles (American chameleons) which I caught during a visit to Florida. The lizards lived in an exquisite terrarium full of houseplants and rocks. I caught grasshoppers and beetles and enjoyed the drama as the lizards came to life from their usual statue-like pose to attack and eat the insects.
One summer, when we went on vacation for two weeks, a neighborhood kid begged to take care of the anoles. He didn’t feed them or provide water. They died.
My grandmother, who had moved to Florida, appreciated my appreciation of reptiles and sent me a two-foot caiman. It arrived in the mail in a cardboard box. Once out, it hissed and snapped its crocodilian jaws. I sold it to a pet store.
I kept a bullfrog — for two days. Its persistent croaking kept me awake. I took it back to the swamp.
I kept a pair of salamanders — newts — in a 10-gallon aquarium. They readily ate worms and chopped meat and, in lieu of television, I could sit in front of the tank and watch them swim.
When I went off to college, I gave them away to one of the neighborhood kids. When I came home for Thanksgiving break, he announced: “We flushed them down the toilet.”
Snakes were my favorite creatures, but feeding them was a challenge. I never attempted to keep constrictors, but I do relish news stories of people who kept enormous pythons in their urban studio apartments, passed out drunk on the sofa, and were eaten by their pets.
Proud as I was of my menagerie, it wasn’t until the fabulous 60s when I saw what a real home zoo looked like. A friend and I delivered a Vietnam War resister to the deserter community in Toronto where we were introduced to someone who said he had an apartment full of reptiles. I was eager for a tour.
It turned out that this guy had the second largest private collection of poisonous snakes in Canada. He had vipers and cobras in tanks everywhere. He also had a five-foot crocodile in his bathtub and a slow loris in a cage. (Yes, that’s a mammal.)
He might have been showing off, but while we were there, he said he needed to de-mite his Gaboon Viper. He advised us to stand on some furniture while he released the snake onto the floor and sprinkled it with insecticide.
That night, I slept on a couch in that apartment with a tankful of diamondback rattlers just above my head.
But there are less demanding pets. Consider fish? Guppies require little care, but they do reproduce — like guppies — so owners can find themselves starting with a pair and ending with a school of fish.
The best pet? Goldfish. After an initial investment of 18 cents per fish, a tank, and a filter, you’re done. You feed them once a day, pay them absolutely no attention and change the filter every two months. And you will never see a posting, online or otherwise, reading, “My Goldy is Missing.” Unless the cat gets to the tank.
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