Rose Garden Resident
Columns
Reconsidering man's best friend
By Matt Baxter
These are not the signs of an advanced society: houses overrun with an incalculable number of cats; unspeakable acts of violence against man or beast by marauding breeds of dogs. Instead what we have are clear indications that we have reached the pinnacle of problem pets.
My animal-loving friends will say that we must blame the (ir)responsible humans, and I agree. How to do that remains the difficulty. It would seem prudent to put such creatures out of reach of people who can't exercise reason. I can just see the bumper stickers: When pets are outlawed, only outlaws will have pets.
The absurd end of the spectrum also defines the other side, the one- or two- or three-pet family that thinks it is doing it for all the right reasons. Usually it is a parent who thinks the lessons--learned as Swimmy the fish is found floating upside down or Hobbit the hamster no longer consumes his dry pellets (because he's dead)--are contributing to the raising of the human children.
I disagree (as I so often do). I've had pets since I was a child, and the most important lesson I learned is how to use a shovel, and perhaps how to operate the handle on the toilet.
Having a pet teaches no more responsibility than having an allowance teaches money management. Children with ready cash learn how to spend it. Young adults learn how to wisely use their finances in small part by the example laid out by their forebears, more largely by their own trial and error. Handing over a quarter for a lost tooth (What? The tooth fairy no longer pays such meager wages?) teaches no one to live within a budget.
After several years of debate in the Baxter household we got a dog in 2004. The disagreement had always divided the family: me against everyone else. Three kids and a wife who thought it would be wonderful, sweet, rewarding. A father who says he knew what was coming. Finally overruled, the old man conceded defeat, and the animal was acquired from the Humane Society.
It wasn't destined to be a disaster. My children are all responsible individuals. They care for their braces-strapped teeth; they keep their rooms clean; they write thank-you notes. The problem wasn't what would happen when we got the dog; the problem was what would happen when we had the dog--for a long, long time.
As the children sat on the living room floor of long ago, piling together funds from their various piggybanks and wallets and wailing how hard they would work to care for the new dog, they swore to pay the adoption agency fee and feed and walk the beast every day, and the parental units would never have to lift a finger. It would almost be like the dog wasn't there.
It would be so easy! Please, please, please! The pleading or the tears overwhelmed the adult judgment, when an overdose of sanity would have saved us all a lot of future grief (and, yes, joy). My wife fell for it. I relinquished my sole veto, and the dog joined the family. For a while, all of the promises were kept.
Then the children began their transition through the teenage years. It wasn't so much that they ignored their pet jobs; they were just too busy to keep up on them. There were too many friends to see, too much homework to do, and sometimes they were just too hard to find.
The dog, which we can refer to as Zen because that was the joke name I threw out over a dinner discussion and somehow was accepted by the rest of the tribe, still needed to be fed and watered and walked. When we could track down a child and ask him or her to take on any particular task ("Why do you always ask me?") it was handled--with a groan.
Otherwise the wife and I were doing it. When I say "the wife and I" of course it really means "the wife." I don't do dog patrol. Didn't want it. Don't want it. Shouldn't have named it.
Over the course of a lifetime I have lived with mice, a rat, hamsters, cats and now a dog. I am not pet-phobic, or pet-detesting. Anyone of legal age who wants a pet should get one because there are many good reasons to have one. I just can't think of any right now.
On the other hand, I am chock- full of reasons not to get a pet: Your kid wants one, your single self thinks it will make you more attractive to the opposite sex (and when it doesn't you'll abandon Fluffy at a county park), or you think you'll make a profit in chinchilla breeding or find protection in a set of rabid canine jaws.
Zen is all right as dogs go, and I will grudgingly admit that she is not the worst thing to happen to me in the last four years. I can even imagine myself some day in the future reminiscing over a few photos and saying, "Oh, look, that dog we had ... What was her name?"
Matt Baxter can be reached at mattbaxter@columnist.com.
