On Pets
♠
I like pets. Really, I do. Like most members of the middle-class, I've had my fair share of them. In college, my roommate and I had a lizard. We used to feed it crickets and watch in stoned-out amazement as the lizard, named Bruce Lee, leapt around the terrarium and snagged its prey with its sticky tongue. Sometimes we would take it out of its enclosure and let it walk on top of our thighs as we rubbed its cool wrinkled skin with our fingers. Bruce Lee always felt disorientated by such excursions—as if he had been magically teleported from horizonless New York City to the vast plains of Kansas—and his whole body would quiver pathetically and invariably squeeze out a whitish, brownish dump on someone's jeans.
I liked Bruce Lee much better than the tarantula we purchased several months later. I can't even remember what the tarantula's name was, probably because it offered us no excitement whatsoever. I suppose we expected it to pounce upon its prey in a more vicious and stealthy fashion, but it would only sit there, motionless, while crickets fluttered about it. I think the tarantula only ate the crickets once they dropped dead from starvation, slowly dragging each corpse with its furry limbs to some obscure location where his feasting was hidden. Sometimes my roommate would feed it dead mice, which came in little packets from the pet store. At mealtimes he would rip one open and draw the mouse out, which emerged eyeless, bleached and fetus-like. In fact, the most exciting time we had with the tarantula was during another stoned-out session in which we played a game: the person who reached into the terrarium and touched it the longest, won.
I liked those pets well enough, but I didn't like them as much as I do dogs, and I'm sure the majority of people would agree with me that dogs are far superior to every other pet. Yes, you have your cat lovers but they are a confused bunch who actually believe their cats love them back. Trust me, they don't. I have lived with several cats, and have witnessed up close and at length the behavior of at least five other cats, and while that does not run the entire gamut of domesticated cat-dom, the facts do not lie:
▪ Cats claw and scratch their human cohabitants more frequently than any other pet (and they feel no remorse about it whatever).
▪ Cats do not rub against your leg/greet you at the door/pay attention to you at all unless they are hungry.
▪ Many cats bolt for the open door, for freedom, whenever the opportunity arises, with not a thought as to how they will live without you (they really couldn't care less), and unlike dogs, there is no reason to believe they will ever come back (they really couldn't care less).
Disdainful, proud, independent, cool: the cat. In fact, I would rather be a cat than any other pet. Better to sit aloof atop the arm of a couch, sphinx-like, and bristle at the touch of strangers, than to run around with your tail wagging, tongue lolling, legs skittering, begging for attention, a biscuit, a pat on the head, a soggy tennis ball to be chucked far into the woods. Yes, I like cats.
But dogs are the best pets, the ne plus ultra of household animals. The first dog our family had was named Boy. I named him myself. The task was given to me at the tender age of three or four, and the enormity of the responsibility at hand must have been akin to what Adam felt at the beginning of the world. I pointed my finger at him and named him what I was: a boy. I'm sure there was some kind of childish logic behind it. Perhaps it was so I could say "Here, Boy!" and wink at my parents, but I doubt that. Perhaps when the moment came to name him, I froze up at the power of it and was reduced to choosing between basic words that hadn't dissolved away under the pressure. Perhaps he was to be "my boy," as I was to my parents. Or perhaps my view of the world was too small to think of anything outside myself.
At any rate, Boy does not loom large in memory (I seem to remember him sleeping a lot—he was much older than I was, even in human years). Over the years, my family had several dogs. I remember one dog got infected with rabies and had to be put down. I have a vague memory of him loping around the yard in the early stages of his sickness, at the time when he started snapping at people, his jaw strangely slack. I remember another dog gave birth to pups, all of whom died, because she was too young to be a mother. My parents told me not to approach her, and indeed she was huddled in a corner looking extremely dark and depressed and as if she wanted to be left alone. (The next year she happily delivered a whole swarm of healthy pups that we passed around like cookies to anyone who would take them—she didn't seem to mind that at all.) Mostly I remember Blackie, who lived with us for five or six years and was the last dog my parents ever owned. We found her in a dog shelter, and I remember my father taking a liking to her even when I was doubtful—at the time I think I wanted something more purebred. Black (of course), of medium size, a mongrel: she was always around during high school though I didn’t think about her much. She died one night in my father's lap after suffering from some horrible, debilitating skin infection. She lived on the porch for the last few weeks of her life, too weak to move, oozing blood and puss, and to this day, my father insists she had waited all day for him to come to her and place her head in his lap, before passing away.
She was a good dog I suppose, loyal and kind and all the rest. But to be honest, it is a rare dog that isn’t good. Unlike cats, dogs feel genuine affection for their masters. It is as if they cannot live without the human touch: it is their drug, their ecstasy. It’s hard to reconcile the thought of such a nice animal with the rest of the brutes of the animal kingdom.
But what do humans get out of it all, this relationship with dogs? Why do so many people own one?
On one level, perhaps a reason we own dogs (or any animal for that matter, from the caged parakeet to the earthworm) is to exercise a kind of dominion. Witness the cruel child grab a dog by its tail or the trainer teach a dog how to play dead—it is not at all a dissimilar pleasure from that of the stoned college kid who manipulates the surroundings of the lowly lizard. And who hasn't thrilled at the brilliant control of it—to clap your hands or let loose a low whistle, and have at the next moment a dog trotting by your side?
Perhaps another reason (which unfortunately has to be mentioned) is the cuteness factor, which mostly applies to mammals, even the gerbils and the guinea pigs and the (if you say so) cats, but not to fish and other characterless organisms. Some adults take pleasure from watching dogs behave in "cute" ways. Like when they roll around on the ground, trying to scratch their backs. Or when their mouths draw back and they look like they're smiling. Partly it is an aesthetic attraction, but intertwined with it is the misconceived idea that dogs are innocent. Every gesture, every curious sniff, every ardent wag of the tail as it senses a walk in the park is imminent, seems to reveal a long-lost innocent state. In fact, the dog is an animal who obeys natural instinct. It is beneath morality, neither good nor evil, and its penchant for licking your face has the same moral worth as that of the shark who would instead bite it off.
But I think the main reason we own and prize dogs is for love. Dogs are veritable factories of love: feed them, they love, pet them, they love, smack them, they love. The love factory is always open, whenever anyone needs it—it’s the season to take, all year long. And perhaps that is why I'm ambivalent about dogs. It seems to me too needy, too greedy to turn to a dog or any other pet for affection. For only an animal can love in that all-embracing, all-forgiving way, and while it is a full, true love, what is it borne from? What is its basis? A doggie bone perhaps. Or a scratch behind the ear. It takes little effort to earn it, but we feel that the happiness it affords is our due. And what kind of person accepts love from a being that is incapable of discerning between his faults and sins and petty ways, and his redeeming qualities if he has any? The dog's love is void of worth: it is empty, undiscriminating, and buyable, like love from a prostitute. The point of drinking its love is to quench a too-desperate thirst. And while we may feel slaked, it is a cheap form of satiety that lets us blindly disregard an emptiness with a more enduring truth.
But perhaps I'm taking this too far. I can’t claim to know the workings of a dog’s mind. It is possible that it reserves its love for those who deserve it. Who is to say what that doggie bone or that scratch on the head means to him? Or for that matter, what it meant to Blackie for my father to draw her head into his lap? Perhaps I can also sympathize with the man who hugs his pet simply because he needs the warmth, both emotional and physical, that he cannot generate on his own.
—RS