A Dude’s Guide

The Angel of Pet Death has hit my house so often, I’m afraid I’m going to have to apply for a zoning change so my backyard can double as a cemetery. I cannot tell you the number of animals we’ve buried back there. No, really. I literally can’t tell you the number, but that’s because I lost track of the number of fish we’ve had at around thirteen. It seems as if every animal we bring into the house lasts a couple of months and then brings down the curtain and joins the choir invisible.

We’ve had to bury fish, hermit crabs, birds, rats, lizards by the ton, a snake and — on one memorable occasion — a swarm of fireflies. (Yeah, that was a very strange summer.) Our death touch with reptiles got so horrible, we eventually bought a cat for our oldest little dude so he’d have something a little hardier and resistant to death in all its myriad forms. So, of course, a couple of days after we brought the cat home we learned it had been exposed to feline leukemia and had a fifty-fifty shot at dying. Turns out we got lucky and the cat is still with us. So far it’s only mammals that tend to survive for long in our household. And every time we had to dig up another plot of ground it was traumatic as heck for the little dude that had owned the previously alive pet.

You haven’t really experienced the joy of life until you’ve just finished breaking roots and digging up frozen ground to stand sweating next to a bawling 8-year-old and try to find a few good things to say about a rat you’re about to bury. And, yes, that was oddly specific. Why do you ask?

However, even with all the trauma and hullaballoo that goes along with a visit from the Angel of Pet Death, I still wouldn’t have deprived my little dudes of owning the smaller pets. They learn responsiblity by caring for them, tenderness by making sure to be gentle and a bit about how death works. Plus, as an added bonus, they got to learn that even a small ribbon snake can really stretch out its mouth and body to swallow a fish wider than it is. Now that was cool.

– Richard

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