![]() ![]() This tortoise was originally given to my wife when she was eight years old. “I can’t keep him,” my father-in-law said. My wife thought it might be some heirloom – a memento from the time when her parents were still married – but when she looked in the box there was only a sleeping tortoise inside. In 1998, on the day of my wife’s mother’s funeral, my father-in-law arrived with a cardboard box under his arm. I figured my one significant relationship with an animal had been and gone. ![]() I was away at college when my parents finally had Daphne put down, and was unprepared for the flood of sadness that accompanied the news. “She likes to pace,” my father would say, carrying her out and depositing her into the groove she’d worn in the snow. But even then she went out on winter mornings to walk clockwise around the house. Towards the end Daphne was blind, deaf and unable to climb stairs. Daphne got let out in the morning and often would not return until late afternoon, perhaps dragging the rotting head of a large tuna collected from the boatyards at low tide. The early 1970s was a very good time to be a dog. My mother said it could stay for one night. It was five years before my father brought home another dog, a starving mongrel that jumped into his car as he was leaving his dental practice. We visited them sometimes, but we could never tell which ones were ours. She did consent to a pair of ducklings one Easter, only to insist they be set free on a pond once they got big. His main legacy was my mother’s strong objection to the idea of another dog. ![]() There were no photos to remember our first dog by, just the toothmarks on my magnetic alphabet. My father would never talk about that day, not even years later. This inevitably led to an incident that resulted in him having to be put down. The dog was uncontrollable, and he also bit people. He figured a smart dog would be a good dog. The dog was cracking mussels open in its jaws, which my father thought demonstrated remarkable intelligence. My father first encountered this dog, a stray, while it was foraging for shellfish along the edge of the salt marsh behind our house. M y earliest memory of a pet is probably my earliest memory, no more than a blur, glimpsed through the bars of my crib: an enormous black dog runs into my bedroom, eats the magnetic letters off my easel and runs out again. It’s the Circle of Life, on fast forward. And then you can’t imagine replacing them, because life without a pet is so carefree. Once you have pets, life without them seems unimaginable. All the lessons of pet ownership will be learned by you, all of them the hard way. It’s often suggested that getting a pet will inculcate responsibility in your children, which is like saying that getting a vacuum cleaner will teach your kids cleanliness. And if you get a kick out of apologising to strangers, you will never be short of reasons. They make fine companions, as long as you don’t mind a friend who throws up on your stair carpet a couple of times a month. Of course there are good reasons to keep pets. At certain points over the last 30 years our house has resembled a menagerie, with representatives from almost every class of vertebrate: mammals, fish, birds, reptiles. My objections went unheeded, and I became a reluctant pet owner many times over. ![]()
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