Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
A mother discovers that owning a pet may be good for the children, but it also has its benefits for mom.
Feb 2, 1998 | There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. For those who do, the inclination to set up binary people-sorting systems is irresistible:
There are people who work best with music playing in the background and people who require silence. People who get lather all over their faces while brushing their teeth and people who keep the toothpaste in their mouths. People who have no appetite in the morning and people who wake up ravenous ...
One might continue forever. But perhaps the only important binary classification to be made for all of humankind is this one: Is she/he a cat person or a dog person?
The attendant characteristics of each type are well-known, well-documented and well-satirized by comedians and comic-strip writers. It's not necessary to belabor the canine traits admired by the dog person -- loyal, direct, kind, faithful, utilitarian, helpful, team playerish, etc. -- and the feline traits admired by the cat person -- graceful, subtle, independent, intelligent, thoughtful, mysterious, etc. Ask someone whether they're a cat person or a dog person and you know everything you need to know about that person. (The dog person won't lie, and the cat person is too proud to lie about that.) What kinds of pets people actually own have no bearing on this theory; all that matters is what they say they are. Ask yourself, and you will know yourself.
Until, that is, it's time to select the family pet and you are the parent. At this point so many other factors come into play that you may no longer have a sense that you are one kind of person or another. Living quarters may be too small for this beast, too large for that. Kids may have allergies to this or that kind of fur. Then there's the care itself. Changing soiled cage bedding? Cleaning tanks? Taking walks twice a day? Straining to hear silent feet padding about the house? All of it seems overwhelming and undesirable, particularly if you have just emerged from the waking up at night and diapering phase. The last thing you want, even if you are a dog person, say, is another companion, another life form requiring your assistance in any way. But there are the kids. And pets are good for kids. So you try to come up with a pet in spite of yourself.
Once I thought of myself as a classic dog person. Direct, shoot-from-the-hip, tell-it-like-it-is, faithful, uncomplicated -- that was me, or what I wanted to be: all dog. (Plus I was afraid of cats.) Then came a child who wanted a pet. Early on we had a rat. I had read they were educable. But the rat starting nipping our daughter and we returned it to the pet shop as snake food. Later we had fish, barely viewable through the algae build-up within the tank; they finally died of a food overdose. Then two gerbils, who one day just stopped moving and were declared dead a few days after that. Then came a series of interviews with breeders of pure-bred dogs. We failed all of the interviews. During the coldest days of 1996 we moved into a new house and started fresh. Pets were a thing of the past. We could live without interspecie relations.
In the spring after our move, as my husband was collapsing boxes in the garage, the neighborhood's feral cat leaped out of a pile of bubble wrap. My husband backed away in fear and worry, cursing the likelihood of what he would call a rat situation. But as he peered down into the box, he saw nestled in the bubble wrap three tiny newborn kittens. Naturally, our children fell in love with one, the all-black one, and began lobbying us to take her in as a pet. (Our neighbor the cat-lover, who had been feeding the feral mother for some time, brought the litter to her screened-in porch for indoctrination as potential pets. The mother has remained wild.)
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