My family hasn't had successful experiences with pets. For one reason or another,
each—although much loved—had a short history with us.
We got our first dog after my son David begged for a pet
when he was about five. Helen
bought a Yorkshire terrier, which David named Sugie. She was a wee thing—so small that when she jumped off a curb
just a week after we got her as a puppy, she broke a knee and had to walk in a
cast for months. Despite her
Lilliputian size, she dutifully sat by the stroller of David's baby sister
Abby, defending her from the neighborhood's large dogs if they dared to come
near—she would ferociously chase them off by yipping and nipping at their
heels.
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| David and Sugie |
Unfortunately for me, Sugie had a propensity for getting
into poison oak and soon sensitized me to that weed, whose effects I'd never
previously suffered—I got successively worse cases of it. Nor was Helen's asthma helped by
Sugie's dander. After a few years,
Helen left her at her mother's when visiting Utah one summer. Sugie's memory was superb, though: when
I visited Utah two years later, she immediately jumped onto my lap. I was thankful that the homestead
didn't seem to harbor poison oak.
Our next animal lived in an outside cage: a husky rabbit,
BunBun, which we inherited from friends.
He was allowed to wander freely in our back yard during the day, where
the kids played with him.
"Dumb as a bunny" had no meaning for him, for he would
endlessly play hide and seek with them, and would always win. The only way to attract him from his
well-chosen hiding places was for David to lie on the ground and play dead;
then BunBun would hop up to him and sniff at his head to make sure he was
alright.
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| Abby and BunBun |
Alas! BunBun
didn't always hide so effectively.
We had hired a neighbor girl to feed him and release him to run free in
the yard each day during a month's vacation we took. The day before we returned, a dog managed to get into our
yard, and dispatched BunBun to rabbit heaven.
Abby begged for another rabbit, so we got a little Dutch
one, for which I built a hutch on our upstairs deck, where she could roam
freely, away from marauders. Abby pledged to take faithful care of her, but I
ended up doing most of the work.
Once, after a week of doing it all, I asked Abby if she had fed the
rabbit. She blanched, for she hadn't, and now feared that the rabbit must have died. After running to the hutch, Abby was relieved to find the
bunny in good health.
This rabbit hadn't heard of "dumb as a bunny"
either. Although the walls of the
deck are more than three feet tall—some ten times the bunny's height—and
opaque, she soon figured out that freedom must lie on their other side. She somehow managed to get to the top
of them (probably via one of the lounge chairs), scramble over our roof, and
spring to the nearest garden wall, never to be seen again.
We thought a dog would engage Abby more, so we bought her a
Cavalier King Charles spaniel, which she called Buttons. Abby was indeed totally enamored of
this pet, and the feeling was reciprocal.
One of his tasks was to awaken Abby each school-day morning, and he
would wait anxiously in the kitchen until given the go-ahead. When told "Go wake Abby," he
would scramble lickety-split down the wood floor of the hallway, make a noisy,
skidding turn into her room, then jump on her bed.
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| Abby and Buttons |
Helen's asthma regrettably intervened again, even more so
than with Sugie. To the sorrow of
all, a year or two later we decided to return him to the breeder, who lived in Washington
state. It fell to me to send him off
at the airport. I still remember
his baleful eyes looking accusingly at me through the door of his cage as he
was driven off on a cart to be loaded onto the airplane.
It must be karma. My family
seems not to have been meant to live symbiotically with pets. Balancing the karmic equation, I
note with some satisfaction that we don't eat any of their four-legged cousins,
confining ourselves to fish and fowl.
That must give us some standing among quadripeds, if not exactly for
longevity of relationships with them.