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I suppose it's not a terrible surprise that I ended up with a degree in zoology, considering that I grew up with animals. We always had pets. Furry pets. Cats, dogs, gerbils (way too many gerbils. Nasty cannibalistic things, gerbils, when there gets to be a few too many of them), guinea pigs, monkeys...
Yeah, we had monkeys when I was very little. I remember a bit about them, like the bamboo cage in the kitchen, and having one on a leash in the back yard. I also remember an old film reel my dad took of one of them that would wait on top of a dining room chair for the chihuahua to pass underneath so that he could leap onto the dog, grab his collar, and ride him around the house. That particular monkey's name was Charlie Brown. The dog? Snoopy, of course.
Poor dog had such a monkey on his back.
You'll notice above that I said furry pets. We never had anything that wasn't furry as a pet here. No birds at all (I'm not sure, but I think that might have been because my grandmother always had birds. Maybe it turned my father off a little). No reptiles either, although having reptiles as pets wasn't very common around here when I was a kid so it probably would have seemed pretty weird anyway.
I didn't find out that I liked snakes until I started working at the nature centre, actually. I remember being asked in the interview if I had experience with snakes, and having only just finished university the previous spring I had to be honest and say only dead ones.
Good ol' zoology degrees. You get to know a lot of dead everything.
Um, yeah. Live snakes turned out to be pretty cool, though. More personality than I would have thought they had. I'm not sure if I'd want the bother (and dead-mouse-defrosting) of having one as a pet, though.
I don't technically have any pets at all at the moment, although I do think of the cats as mine as well as Dad's (and, more importantly as all cat owners know, the cats obviously think of me as theirs). I live in a pet-free apartment building (supposedly pet-free. There seems to be an awful lot of "pretend" dogs about for pet-free) and my apartment's pretty small, so it would be a bit difficult to have a pet even if I wanted to.
Do I want to? Well like I said before, I grew up with animals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have something around if I could.
So what would it be, then?
I dunno.
Probably not a dog. Don't get me wrong -- I like dogs. What I don't like is needy, and dogs have that in spades. Sure, it might be rewarding to come home after work and have some dog wagging at the door waiting for me, but there comes a point with dogs where I always feel like saying CAN'T YOU FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO???. Maybe it's just that our last dog was neurotic, I don't know, but if you look back through the archives at any time I house-sat for Dad while she was still around, you'll find me just about going bats by the end of the week. All that constant what are we going to do now and what are we going to do now and what are we going to do now...
Yep. There's more than one reason that I don't have kids.
I don't think I'd have a salamander or a frog as a pet either, even though they're about fifty billion times less needy than dogs. Why not, then? Simple. Crickets. I hate crickets, and I deal with them enough at work. They stink. And as careful as you are with them, there's always going to be one or two that manage to escape. And then? Singing. Gah. Look, I know that there are plenty of people out there who really like the sound of crickets singing, and if crickets are singing outside that's just ducky. When they're insistently singing from a random corner of a room and you can't find them? Not exactly soothing.
Let's face it -- anyone who knows me knows that I would end up with cats. Nothing wrong with that; I'm good with cats. I like to think that I get cats, and cats generally get the fact that it's ok to have attention for a little while and then go do something else. I know that dog people don't care much for the independent streak in cats, but that's all right for me. I like my alone time, as any one of the people I dated seriously back in the day can tell you (oh, but that's really another story for another time. Really really for another time). Cats are like boyfriends who work on the oil patch. Just when you're getting sick of them they go away for a while.
Ok, I'm laughing at myself for that last one. Sounds like I need to rent a pet rather than own one, doesn't it?
The big problem with cats (besides litter boxes, I suppose) is that I'm allergic to them. Might be an issue, yes? Oh, not so much. Like I said, I grew up with cats. I also tend to acclimatise to cats that I'm around regularly. Allergies wouldn't stop me from getting a cat.
If I were going to get a cat.
Which I'm not, in the foreseeable future.
Guess I'll have to keep borrowing Dad's cats, then. Oh, and for anyone concerned about my allergies after seeing the shot of Penny on the laundry, don't worry.
It was Dad's laundry.
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