I’ve never had a typical North American relationship with pets…or at least not what American urbanites would recognize as typical. I grew up in rural Texas, on a cattle ranch. Don’t get me wrong, I had pets growing up. I had a ton of pets. Let me recount them all…
Let’s see, there was Miss Piggy, my three legged pig. There was Mimi, the mama cat who raised several litters of kittens successfully by birthing them in tree top forts built by us kids. There was “Masochistic Kitty,” “baby calf,” several ducks, and a couple dozen rabbits. There was of course my dog, Iye. (Don’t ask me about the name.) She was the only animal I had that could be considered a traditional pet.
She disappeared after I left home for college. Upon my homecoming, my parents gave some lame explanation about some old, bind guy who needed a comfort animal as a pet. I allowed myself to believe Iye spent her last years being pampered by an elderly gentleman in Ft. Worth. She probably got run over. In the end, almost all of our dogs got run over. Only my dad’s favorite Brittny, Baby, had a more dignified death. She peacefully wondered into the back woods one winter morning and laid down on a pile of leaves to breathe her last.
That’s the thing. I’ve never had a typical “master to pet” relationship with an animal, until now. We ate Miss Piggy. We ate “baby calf.” We ate all the rabbits (save one that was too old and gristly). We would have eaten the ducks, but a bull snake beat us to it. He ate so many ducks there wasn’t a chance of it escaping the wire pen. You could see all the little duck lumps inside the snake when we found it struggling to wriggle its way back through the chicken wire. I remember my dad saying something like, “you just got greedy,” right before chopping the snake in two with a hoe.
Wild animals ate most of the cats. And eventually a trailer tire would catch the dogs, or they would lose their sense of hearing and fall asleep underneath the truck until one particular morning we would forget to check for them before cranking up the motor and backing out. Never can I remember taking an animal to the vet. We knew the vet. We would need him to check a horse or a cow every now and then. But those were “money animals.”
During the early stages of the pandemic, we adopted a bunny—an indoor, free-range, letter-box-trained, bunny. A pet. Our first ever pet. (I’m not counting the hermit crabs.) Dynamite has a personality that we’ve all come to reckon with, for good and for worse. And it has awakened strange feelings inside me. When he gets sick or is experiencing pain, I’m the first one to insist we call the vet. When dynamite refuses to eat, I swaddle him and insist the wife help me syringe feed him enough that his GI tract doesn’t go into stasis.
What’s happening to me?
I simply can’t accept the idea of someone under my responsibility suffering and dying when there is something I can do about it. Recently, the truth struck me. These protective feelings intensify in direct correlation to how helpless the other individual is. The more helpless the situation, the more I am unable to endure not helping. I guess I’ve always been this way. It’s just taken most of my life to come to grips with what it means for how I am to operate on a daily basis. I’m still not sure I’ve completely figured it out. But I’m moving in the right direction, and I’ve got little, fuzzy Dynamite to serve as my mascot along the way.
At the Desk This Week
I’ve got nothing to report this week. Nothing but excuses. Sickness, locusts. I had four flat tires! In reality, I’ve started coaching my son’s basketball team through the local rec center. Good times. But I’ve not been so disciplined in preserving my creative space.
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