Why I Don't Like Animals

I grew up, like every American child, bombarded with stories of companionship and animal heroism. Shiloh, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Spot, 101 Dalmations, Homeward Bound, Free Willy – I read or watched it all. I suffered the pro-animal bias, and as a kid I wanted – better – needed a pet.

Of course, everybody wants a dog when they are young, and I thought I did, too. Man’s best friend – full of energy, obedient, and always at your beck and call. Unfortunately, because of allergy issues within my family, including myself, my mom nixed that idea. The real reason was probably because she hated cleaning dog crap off the bottom of our shoes, or worse, in the summertime, bare feet. I remember the first time I felt poop slime through my toes – definitely ruined my game of “kick the can” We also had eight immediate neighbors around our suburban home. At one time, every one of them had a dog. The biggest, meanest one was right by the swingset, and one day it leapt over the fence and chased me all the way to my front door. Fritz the wiener dog, behind us, barked at anything that moved, at any time of the day or night. And one of the dogs must have had dysentery, because it left behind the foulest puddles of doggie diarrhea.

So I learned I could not be a dog lover, and figured I would have to be a cat person. But I remembered hating how they would use my childhood sandbox. I’d scoop sand into the back of the Tonka truck and find a dirty little cheese curl about an inch underneath the sand. And this was back when I still used to put my hands in my mouth all the time. I did admire their hunting skills. The real demise of the cat idea came when I saw the matching, three pronged, foot-long scratches on my babysitter’s arms. Supposedly she also had some mob ties, so who knows. In retrospect, she may have been climbing over a fence to escape pulling an Adriana and lied about it. It also pissed me off that cats got to eat fish every night, while I seemed to always eat leftovers.

A fish tank would have been great, but after sleeping over my cousin’s house, I knew that couldn’t work. He had stocked his tank with eels from the bait shop for the fishing trip the next day, and the scene the next morning was disastrous. I woke up with a trail of eel mucous on my arm, and next to my face I watched an eel writhing in its last moments of life. What’s better? None of his buddies had witnessed his desperate attempt to slither to freedom — they were all floating in the tank, overcome by rigor mortis.

I knew I didn’t want a bird after my brother brought home a dove in second grade. Apparently prime cooing time is 2am to 4am. My dad also made us watch Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, and I lost interest in anything with wings. I thought a frog might be fun, but I could catch them at the pond, and they had poor longevity. I would hold them in my hands for a couple of hours, and they would die from heat stroke. I had grown a frog from one of those kits, too, but it died when my brother fed it cheerios. Home Alone made tarantulas cool, but spiders make me want to throw up. Did you know they molt? Tarantulas shed their shell in order to grow. One time my brother threw an empty tarantula shell on my bed when I was reading. I jumped back so fast I almost fell out the window and off the roof. A guinea pig, or a mouse, or a Chihuahua? My mother didn’t approve of rodents taking up floor space. I meant Chinchilla, but a Chihuahua is technically a rodent, too.

I think my dad got the point that I wanted a pet, sensed my disappointment, and began to bring home funny pets from his travels all over the U.S. He flew home once with a pair of lizards from the California desert in a Folgers-can with holes poked in it. This was pre-9/11. The airlines didn’t confiscate your tweezers or gels, and they certainly didn’t give a shit about your smuggled lizards. I got a skinny black one with a long tail, and my brother got one covered with tiny spikes. We decided to bring them to their native environment – back to the sand box, folks — and they took off for the woods so fast our diving grabs resulted in nothing but bumped heads. Neil got the end of the skinny one with his hand, but it dropped its own tail immediately and went right under the fence. I also babysat my friend Scott’s lizard when he was on vacation. I fed it, gave it water, rubbed its back. It took a week to notice the thing hadn’t moved an inch. He might as well have brought over a rock, because the thing was stone dead in no time.

Somehow my dad also brought home a Madagascan hissing cockroach. Not sure what happened to it (Mom threw it in the garbage disposal), but it had to have hated its life. It was trapped in a plastic box, and every two minutes one of us punks would push down on its back after it recharged its hiss-gland. It did make for a nice show-and-tell, though.

I went to the flower show with my mother one year, and bought a Venus Fly Trap. It was the closest I could get to a living animal. If an object touched one of its many “mouths,” it would slam shut like a trap door. That also met death by cereal. There just weren’t many flies around, and I got impatient waiting to see the trick.

What I learned from all this is I don’t really do well with pets. What can they give me? Companionship? Loyalty? Excrement? All of these and more I can find in fellow human beings. I prefer animals shanked, seasoned, and tossed on the grill. What could be better than enjoying a nice duck, pork, or lamb dish, while a date sits across the table (making good use of canines also, I hope).

I actually wrote the first version of this in high school, and since then, I have realized I do like animals, I just prefer them to be in the wild. I’d love to go on a safari (or as my Dad calls it, “Disneyland: Africa”). I love diving in the ocean and seeing fish and crustaceans and turtles. I watched Planet Earth with my jaw dropped like everyone else. I chased a llama through a Chilean National Park. I enjoy seeing them all, and I’m just not ready to commit to one animal. At least not yet.