Family Pets

When I was growing up, pets were always a pretty big part of our family.  Sometimes for our pets we paid a great deal of money, like our dogs; at other times the pets were what we caught outside and put in a cage, like various snakes and lizards.  One time when our family was vacationing in southern Utah, we caught a pretty big lizard.  This wasn’t any ordinary wimpy lizard like the ones we would catch around our neighborhood.  This was a cross between one of those ordinary lizards and a dragon, making it very non-wimpy.  We were so proud of ourselves at having captured such a wild and ferocious looking creature and looked forward to taming it and making it the latest family pet.  Our first clue that it wasn’t terribly domesticated was when it grabbed a hold of my brothers finger with its vice gripping, lock-jaws.  I am telling you, this thing had my brother’s finger buried up to the second knuckle and it wasn’t letting go.  I can still see the look in my brother’s eyes as he just repeated the words “Get it off, Get if off, GET IT OFF,” with a slight hint of panic and terror in his voice.  Well we didn’t want to pull on the lizard too hard.  Dang, the way it was locked on there, the finger could have come off in the process.  We didn’t want to pull the tail off of the lizard, because who wants a lizard with only part of a tail for a pet.  We would have shoved a garden hose down it’s mouth, with the water running at full bore, in an attempt to see if that would free the jaws of life, but just as we were about to do that we realized that we were in the desert and we didn’t have a hose, or a water faucet, or any water.  Well, eventually the lizard got bored and just let go, maybe it was just full.  So we found a container to put our bounty in and got in the car with visions of showing all our friends the cool dragon lizard that we caught.  However, before we got too far on our drive home, somehow the creature escaped its temporary living quarters and was soon making its acquaintance with my mom.  This was not a good situation.  Evidently mothers do not like demon lizards scurrying up their clothes and setting roost in their hair.  I had never seen mom move so fast, although she couldn’t really go anywhere, so it was more just a very fast flailing around violently there in the front seat.  And the screams; the decibel level certainly was beyond what was safe for my young ears.  Well once we finally corralled our new pet, we were promptly instructed to get that thing out of the car.  This had to be one of the shortest lived pet experiences in my lifetime.  But in those 10 minutes, I felt like I developed a special relationship with that handsome little critter.  The hurt has never fully gone away.

Although I was very young, I have vivid memories of our pet Mynah bird.  For those of you that don’t know what a Mynah bird is, it is a black bird slightly larger than a Robin and it has a yellow streak that wraps around the side and back of the head kind of like a crown.  The best part about a Mynah bird is that they can talk.  At least we kids thought that was cool.  My mom on the other hand hated that bird with a passion.  Since my mom was home all day the bird tended to pick up many of my mom’s phrases, including her laugh, which it heard repeatedly while she was talking on the phone.  The bird’s name was Sam.

Sam the bird came before the dog.  It turns out my dad liked big dogs.  Dad ended up getting a very well-bred Great Dane.  This was one beautiful and very large dog.  The papers from the breeder had the dogs’ name listed as Samari.  So we then had a Sam the bird and a Sam the dog.  Sam the dog felt the same way about the bird as my mom did.  The dog would listen to the bird say “Hello, my name is Sam,” many times a day.  The dog would go up to the bird cage, stick his nose up against it, sniff around and promptly get his nose pecked at by his namesake.  The dog would just jump back and bark as if to put the bird on notice that he wasn’t going to allow this to pass.  Then the next day this process would be repeated, again and again. 

Sam the bird didn’t last too much longer as my mom could not put up with it anymore.  So Sam the dog was the king of the castle, uncontested.  Raising a Great Dane brings with it a few unique challenges that you won’t face with a smaller breed of dog.  For example the need to keep small clothing items off the floor.  This is a very difficult task for a bunch of little kids, but the penalty for not following this rule of the house was swift and decisive.  Sam would eat the underwear or sock, usually swallowing them whole.  That was the bad news.  The good news was that we could usually go out in the back yard a few days later and retrieve said socks or underwear.  The bad news was that we never really could bring ourselves to clean the clothing items and reuse them.  The moral of the story is, “Once the underwear passes through the dog, the kids will pass on the underwear.” 

Here are some other words of advice while raising a Great Dane:

·         Don’t leave the birthday cake unattended

·         A bored Great Dane puppy, left unattended for too long, just might get bored and tear up the couch

·         You are going to need a bigger shovel

·         You are going to need a bigger car

·         Poops the size of your head, stink enough to make you gag

·         Contrary to what the kids will say prior to getting a dog, they really will not willingly clean up the poops from the yard, even if it means they will find their missing underwear.

·         You are going to need some help carrying the 50 pound bag of dog food out of the store

·         A happy Great Dane can pose a threat.  When that tail gets a wagging hard, stay out of its way.  My mom sustained many a bruise on her legs over the years from not steering clear of the “happy tail”.  It was also a serious threat to 4 teenaged boys and their family jewels.  It is a good thing that I sometimes played catcher in baseball and had an athletic cup.  It could withstand a direct hit from the happy tail.

·         Your walls will never be the same.  Slobber wads will sprinkle the walls from floor to ceiling.

·         You won’t be walking the dog; the dog will be walking you.

Now after all this you may be wondering why anyone would ever want a Great Dane.  Well, to be completely fair to the breed:

·         Great Danes are great, well tempered dogs that look as handsome and regal as a dog can be

·         You won’t need to worry about someone breaking into your house

·         Be prepared for that big loveable thing to become a part of the family. 

·         They love to lay next to the window where the warm sun is shining through and take a nap with the kids

·         They love to sit on the couch, with their butt on the couch and their front paws on the floor, watching TV with the rest of the family

·         They love to play.  They neck wrestle, run around the house and yard, and generally goof off.

·         They know very well the words “Do you want to go for a walk?” – After uttering these words, per the “Happy Tail” comment, you need to steer clear of the tail.

·         They love to put their front paws on your shoulder while you are standing, with their back feet on the ground, exceeding your height (even if I am 6’ 3”).  I tried to teach Sam ballroom dance, but that didn’t quite work.

In fact our family wasn’t satisfied with just one Great Dane.  Several years after Sam graced our house, we got another one whom we named Reggie.  Reggie was a beautiful dog also.  He, like Sam, had very good “Show Dog” bloodlines, and we had to promise to show him before the breeder would let us have him.  What a huge, imposing animal he was.  Once we started showing Reggie, we quickly found out that the show circuit was not for him.  Any time the judge would touch his haunches, he would start shaking like a leaf.  That was the end of his show days.  It turns out that this was the beginning of a lifetime of shaking for this dog.  He had some type of condition that progressively got worse so that he would shake when trying to lie down, shake when trying to lean down to eat, shake when you looked at him cross-eyed, you get the picture.  It was really kind of sad and it ended up cutting his life short as his heart could not take the constant stress. 

Somehow, from the time I was a kid to the time that I had my own kids, the whole family pet thing took a drastically wimpy turn.  I went from growing up with snakes, lizards and Great Danes, to entertaining rodents in our home.  My girls one day declared that they wanted guinea pigs for pets.  I am thinking, a guinea pig isn’t a pet; it is a boring rodent that just eats and poops, and we aren’t having any of those in my house.  Well, as usually happens in my house, what I say goes, and within months we had two guinea pigs in the house.  The girls just loved those eating and pooping machines.  I got to tell you though, there is one thing I do like about Guinea Pigs… Their poops are neatly packaged into these shaped little pellets that remind you nothing of a Great Dane poop.  No smell and no mess.  For some reason the kids and my wife, got a great deal of pleasure out of those cuddly little fur balls.  

I think one of the most traumatic days in the lives of my two girls was the day that they learned that guinea pigs are quite the delicacy in some parts of South America.  My son liked to remind them of this fact on a regular basis.

Having the guinea pigs forced us to face one of the great ethical dilemmas of our time; The old “pet vs. money” dilemma.  One of the pigs developed a lump in her shoulder area.  For this particular situation we had a few different levels of this dilemma to deal with.  From my perspective I was considering the pigs as disposable pets.  You know, you get them, have your fun with them, but if they show any signs of breaking down you throw that one away and get a new one.  You certainly don’t spend money taking them to the vet.  So here was the first level of the dilemma… Do we spend $100 dollars taking this thing to a veterinarian?  Well as I was getting ready to articulate the reasons why I couldn’t see spending this kind of money on a guinea pig, the girls created some sort of distraction in the house, while my wife slipped out of the house with the pig.  So the vet ended up saying that this growth could possibly be cancerous, but likely not, but that it still would be advisable to remove it since it would continue to get bigger.  The surgery was going to cost over $400.  Ok, so here is the second level of the “pig vs. money” dilemma.  I mean we paid maybe $40 for this pig and now we are talking about spending 10 times that to fix it.  That is like wrecking a car that you paid $2,000 for and then paying $20,000 to get it fixed.  No right thinking human being is going to do that.  They are going to say good riddance to that car and go get a new car.  Somehow my logic wasn’t sinking in.  It was then that I insisted that I could cut the critter open and rip out the offending lump myself, but I got the same answer from the girls that I would routinely receive when I offered to save the family some money by cutting their hair.  So it is me against 3 crying women and one teenaged son who was trying not to cry.  It was around this time that the kids then told me that someone was on the phone for me and when I went to get the phone, my wife snuck out of the house with the pig. 

So the girls loved their guinea pigs so much that Ashley says she wants a pet rat to add to the pet collection. She says she has been saving her babysitting money so she can buy one.  Of course my first response was to say that I am not allowing a rat into our home, but the plotting in the household continued.  My daughter had gotten books from the library to read up on “pet rats.”  There’s an oxymoron for you.  She then announced that she wants two of them, so they can keep each other company.  My theory is that if you buy two they can socialize with one another and better plan their evil plots against the humans. I told her there is no way we are letting rats in this house, because I saw the movie Ben when I was growing up and I know what those things are capable of. Selling rats as pets is part of an evil plot, with the intent of preying on the ignorance of those who don’t remember that movie. Would you let your child have a Great White Shark for a pet?  Exactly. You wouldn’t.  Because you saw the movie Jaws.  When I started to realize I was losing the argument, I tried a bit of reverse psychology.  I was thinking “My brother is a psychologist, so I should be good at this.”  So I changed my position and agreed that not only should we get rats, but that we should get a male and a female, so that they can breed, thus providing us a good source of food for the boa constrictor that I was going to buy.  Once again, my reasoning fell on deaf ears and sure enough, it wasn’t long before we had two female rats in our home and zero boa constrictors.  By this time, with my lack of skills in the art of persuasion, I am beginning to understand why I am not an attorney.

Comparing these two types of pets I have learned a thing or two and can share my expertise should any of you be considering guinea pigs or rats as pets.  Rats have a completely different type of personality than guinea pigs.  Guinea pigs kind of just sit there, look cute, eat and poop.  Rats race around constantly, never sitting still, they look not so cute, and even sometimes give you that look of, when you are sound asleep I am going to get out of my cage and chew your eyelids off.  They eat plenty and they don’t tend to poop outside of their cage as much as guinea pigs, but they sure leave little pee drops everywhere they go.  Supposedly this means that they like you… So how does this type of behavior make any of these animals good pets is my question?  If a dog goes around the house pooping and peeing on the carpet, it is disgusting and unacceptable behavior and that dog is going to get a beat down.  If I was invited over to some friends’ house for dinner, and I went around pooping on the carpet and marking my territory by peeing in different parts of the house, I am thinking I am not getting a return invitation.  But for some reason when guinea pigs and rats do this stuff it is cute and adorable.