Pets. Bastards.

So my family constantly badger me about getting a dog, which I suppose is better than dogging me about getting a badger, and I bark back the tiresome default response relating to how their inability to look after our guinea pig renders them in all likelihood completely incapable of caring for a much larger and needier pet.  I mean, it’s not my fucking guinea pig, but I’m the one who has to clean the cunt out.  I apologise for employing the term cunt and never mean it in the genital context, although the guinea pig does bear some resemblance to a classic 1970s German soft porn growler.  And cleaning out its hutch provides me with an experience of eternal surprise in regard to the animal’s capacity for shitting five times its own body mass within a fortnight and drenching the woodchip, newspaper and rotting wooden floor with a stagnant ocean of piss that causes me to suffer retina-trauma as the ammonia burns its way through my eyeballs as soon as I penetrate the filthy bedding with the first stab of a hand shovel.  I even clip its claws.  I am the only one who therefore picks the bugger up.  And yet he shows me no recognition or affection in return.  The most we ever get back is a high-pitched squeak which means Oi, my water bottle is empty or Oi, my food bowl is empty.  The only thing it has going for it is that it doesn’t bite and can live outside the house.

Unlike the hamster we had before.  Hamsters have fuckall going for them.  They don’t even have the advantage of a cute little squeak.  We had one a few years ago and it stunk out the dining room, bit my finger, chewed up bog rolls and only earned the label of being our pet on account of living inside a cage and being fed by us.  If it had appeared in the dining room of its own free will, cost-free, cage-free and uninvited, then we would have treated it like a mouse and set the traps.  The difference between pet and vermin in such cases is all in the level of invitation.

The hamster had been purchased, like most pets, to please the children and was a development of the even-lower-maintenance household animal, a goldfish.  Again, I was the only one who cleaned those bastards out, usually when the tank got to a point where you couldn’t see anything inside it; not that seeing inside was an issue, because the kids’ interest in the fucking things lasted marginally longer than the goldfish’s memory of having the kids actually look at it through the glass.  There was an interest-vacuum in the fish that lasted from the day after purchase to the day when it floated to the surface and drifted around on its side like an offensively un-flushable turd, providing a stark lesson to the kids about mortality and the futility of our own existence; which wasn’t quite how they’d interpreted it until I actually explained it in those terms.

The common personality quality of the guinea pig, the hamster and the goldfish was that none of them sought to kill another animal; although of course the hamster would have fucking savaged the flesh off me down to the bone if I didn’t happen to be a damn size bigger than the good-for-nothing little fucker.  This elevates all of these species above the domestic cat, an evil bastard of quite extraordinary insidiousness.  Easily the most exploitative of common pets, the cat’s habit of bringing into the house half-ravaged carcasses of birds and rodents, or sometimes semi-dead versions of such victims, is defended by the cat-owning community as small kindnesses and the cat’s method of giving its owner a present.  What bollocks!  That’s the cat saying to you, Feed me you cunt, or I’ll fuck you up like this, YOU HEAR ME? I’LL FUCK YOU UP, MOTHERFUCKER!!  A cat only has to look at me and I can read that same threat in its eyes.  They have the audacity to do that and then jump on your lap and expect a cuddle.  Cats want to be the babies of the babyless, until the babyless have a baby and then cats want to kill their baby.

Which brings us back to dogs and my family hounding me to get one (groans, sorry!)  Dogs do have a great many qualities and are the only animals that deserve to be granted pet status.  In other words, they benefit from living with people.  They’re hardly caged birds after all.  They are loyal, they interact and they are grateful.  But we don’t half forgive them a lot just because they’re dogs.  Imagine if a well-loved family member moved in with you and spent all of his or her time following you around the house, asking Who’s at the door? Who’s on the phone?  What are you eating?  Imagine them expecting to be fed and bathed and taken for walks and entertained with some repetitive game like throwing a ball which is brought back to you dripping in their fucking saliva.  Imagine if they plonked their head on your lap while you were watching telly and looked at you with a pathetic, dependent and gormless look in their eyes and then tried to eat your food or lick your face with breath smelling of their own fucking genitals.  And as if that’s not bad enough, imagine if their shit smelt the way dog-shit smells.  And you had to pick it up off the street whenever you went out.  People say dogs are like family members, but if family members were like dogs, you’d be pretty swift to apply some early euthanasia.

The only pet I ever had that I liked was a tortoise, and that’s because he looked like a dinosaur and I was nine.  And life in those days wasn’t saturated with videos of tortoises doing “funny” things or photos of cute tortoises being posted on social bloody media sites.  But there was a lot more dog poo around and you couldn’t go out for stepping in some.