Pets…

It’s funny what your mind turns to when you’re lying awake at night, like I frequently do. Last night, I was passing the time by trying to work out why people keep animals as pets.
It’s not something that I’ve ever been able to understand, frankly. I like animals, for sure, but keeping them in your house, fussing over them, treating them like kids, not giving them any meaningful, useful activities to do? That, to me, is plain weird.
Growing up, my family had a cat or two, maybe three. It shows how little interest I took in them that I can’t even remember precisely how many, let alone their names or anything. All I remember is that they kept having kittens quite regularly, I thought that watching a cat give birth was interesting and that kittens were cuddly.
When I was around twelve or so, my stepfather bought me a tortoise. I didn’t want it – we were walking through a street market, went over to look at a pet stall, and I said something about one of the tortoises on display. It was probably something like “Gosh, what a big tortoise!”, but my stepfather, at that time not long moved in with us and therefore very anxious to please me, took it as a sign that I actually wanted the thing. In less time than I could think of how to explain that I had only wanted to look at it, I was walking home with it in my hand.
Still, at least it was an easy pet to keep – feed it lettuce and vegetable peelings every now and then, polish up its shell with olive oil every now and then, and put it in a box of dry leaves come winter. Watching it slowly creep around was strangely soothing, and I grew quite fond of it. It died a couple of years later, and my stepfather then bought me a dog.
40-odd years on, I still don’t know why he thought it was a good idea. I’d say that somebody must have sold him the dog when he was drunk, except that he was an alcoholic and therefore in some stage of drunkenness almost all of the time, and that was the only time he ever bought an animal home. Perhaps he thought it would get me out of my bedroom, where I tended to spend much time rotting my brain with strange music, ghastly books, horrid magazines and not enough oxygen. (Much later, I found out that he thought I was on drugs at this time. I wish.)
The dog was some sort of labrador cross, and young, needing lots of exercise. So I found myself daily trailing along behind it, wishing I was back in my bedroom doing something interesting. I would watch it pee and poo. Then it was onto the green for what I had been assured was an absolutely necessary half-hour of watching it running around. It would bring sticks to me, or its ball, pleading with me to throw it. But every time I obliged and threw the stick, or the ball, the dog would immediately bring it back to me and ask me to throw it again!
“Why?” I would shout at it, “Why do I have to do something so useless? Why do you have to do something so useless? Why?????”
But the dog would just sit there, with its big pleading eyes and its hanging-out tongue and its waggy waggy tail, until I threw the thing again, or until the allocated half-hour of exercise was up. Existential questions evidently never troubled it, unlike me.
Pretty soon, I started making excuses for not taking it out. When the excuses didn’t work, I would make the exercise time shorter and shorter. I would forget to feed it. I would leave its grooming to my stepfather. Left to its own devices for way too much of the time, the dog started barking, running around outside, and pooing in the neighbours’ gardens, prompting complaints.
Pretty soon my parents got the idea, and the dog disappeared. Their explanation was that it had gone to a farm, with a family with lots of children. I knew that was a lie (teenagers are good at spotting lies), but didn’t ask again.

And that’s about my experience with pets. Wonder what the next 2am ruminations will bring?