Ode to Animals:Part 1

I’ve always been a pretty intense person. That intensity tends to hijack just about everything, including my capacity to love. I love instinctively, the way little kids do–big and crazy, without a lot of forethought about social norms.

I mention this because I have wondered if having a lot of love inside of you sets you up for certain things—like for being a hummer or a whistler, maybe, or  for hiccuping because you laugh too hard, or for having a soft spot for animals…even manic Jack-Russell-Brittany-Spaniels who wreak the sort of havoc usually  attributed to a team of gremlins.

When I was a kid, our family grew and shrank as various animals traveled in and out of our house. I had three or four hamsters named Scooby 1-4 (respectively); a couple guinea pigs all named Honeybear; two birds, both named Peepers; several mice named Snowball; and at least a dozen pairs of goldfish that went by the aliases Titch and Grover. This is besides dogs, who—don’t argue because you’ll lose— belong at the top of the pet pyramid. (Well, maybe not my current dog, Little Wrig, but dogs in general.)

I don’t remember anyone consciously trying to impart any type of philosophy on animal care, but I do remember looking up to my dad, who had his own pet-loving history that started with a canine savant known as Rex the WonderDog. Growing up, Dad also had two pet monkeys, the first of which he ordered through the mail and convinced his parents to let him keep after telling them he had to pick up a “friend” from the airport.

When I was younger, Dad built a cage into the wall of his office for two iguanas. He would chop them fresh vegetables everyday, which is maybe why they grew so big and strong so fast, eventually outgrowing their surroundings. The pet store offered to buy the iguanas for a nice profit, but Dad gave them away instead. I never asked him about it, but I don’t think animals were a commodity in his eyes. I don’t think selling our animals made any more sense to him than selling my brothers. (I, on the other hand, would’ve sold my brothers, but not our dog, for the right price)

Even though Dad never told me what to believe about animals, I think maybe he showed me something about them…by approaching all of nature with a sense of playful and reverent wonder. We caught fish, for example. But we always, always, always threw them back alive. We never kept them. And we NEVER ate them. Not once.
 
As far as I know, Dad has only been on one hunting trip. When I was a kid, he tagged along with some men from the church. But later when I asked him about the hunting trip, Dad told me saw some deer, but just sat there watching them and never even picked up the bow. A waste of a perfectly good cross bow, I guess.

On a regular basis, we caught frogs and snakes and fireflies—which we’d keep in a box or a jar for a couple hours to look at before settling them back into the wild. And along the way we set up makeshift shoebox hospitals to save several abandoned birds and life-flighted quite a few turtles out from the middle of this or that road. I still stop for turtles for this day. (I need a bumper sticker like the ones school buses have  to warn other drivers that they stop at railroad tracks: “I stop for turtles.” I also swerve for squirrels, if they make a bumper sticker for that.) My brothers do too.

Not too long ago, my dad’s pug died. It had been deaf and blind for years, but Dad said he wasn’t going to put it to sleep as long as it could go up the stairs. It went up the stairs, slow and wobbly, for years before the day came where  it couldn’t go up anymore. On that day, the rule was revised and Dad began carrying the pug up and down the stairs, declareing he wasn’t going to put him to sleep unless the dog stopped “looking like he enjoyed the outdoors.” Pug must’ve sensed his life was in jeopardy because he did a particularly good job of smiling it up whenever he was outside after that. It wasn’t until the Pug started whimpering in pain that Dad finally relented to the veterinarian’s shot.

Did I mention we always buried our animals with appropriate ceremony too? You can’t just flush your little golden scaled brother down the toilet without a tribute to all he accomplished in his two week life span. Or when Dusty, our longtime family dog was dying, we gave her a last meal of vanilla ice cream and stayed up late drawing Crayola polaroids of her to preserve her in our memories.

Dad’s affection for domestic animals is still going strong courtesy of the stray-cat-turned-miniature-cougar of the household, which waits for my Dad at the door and follows him around as if it is a more-superior dog. It is only known as “Cat”. Dad is also currently raising two tadpoles that have been tadpoles so long, the rest of us are sure they are guppies. (He bought some sort of aquarium in the store and it came with a free mail-order guppy—I mean,  “tadpole”–coupon.)

I am sure my mom had something to do with our ideas about animals too. She’s probably the one who ordered us Ranger Rick magazine as kids and who reminded us to pop our popcorn in time to watch that Wildlife show that came on before the Disney Sunday movie. A lot of our favorite Disney movies were sort of Animalish too, when I think about it. We watched Bambi and Lady and the Tramp so many times that I’m probably one of the only adults who sings the lullaby from Lady and the Tramp to my son. The few people who’ve heard me always ask where the song is from and when I explain it, they look at me like they’ve never even seen that scene from Lady and the Tramp . What is the world coming to?

They do tend to remember “We Are Siamese If You Please”–the manipulative and nasally cat duet. Guess it had a catchier tune.

Another early childhood influence was my childhood best friend, Lindsey, who lived out in the country. Lindsey’s mom, Sheila, was always rescuing animals. I’m not sure if she did it for the Humane Society or just because she had one of those big hearts that draws babies and animals like a magnet. Their family had a pot bellied pig, turkeys, wounded raccoons, chinchillas, lots of barn cats and these little dogs I just now remembered were named Bandit and… Freebie? I think Bandit may have been a Benji-ish dog, whatever those are called, and Freebie always reminded me of Toto. They would follow us down to the creek where Lindsey and I would wade knee-deep in the mud while catching frogs and fish in a bucket. We were always afraid the leeches would get us, but they never did. We must’ve had a special super power that repelled leeches.

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