No One is Handing Me Any Awards for Being a Stellar Pet Owner

Animal Welfare Please Do Not Read

I never had a dog growing up. I had a fish. Not sure if you can consider a menu item a pet. Living in an apartment, I tried for a Hamster or Gerbil. My mother’s claim was that she would move out if anyone brought home a rodent. Many times I wanted to challenge that threat.

I come from a long line of cat haters, but once I found freedom in my first apartment, I decided that I would get one. I ended up with some sort of long hair grey Persian or Himalayan cat that I named Jacqueline, and I ridiculously pronounced it with a pompous French accent. I lost the cat. Not a euphemism for death, as I literally lost the cat when I took her for a ride. Hindsight be damned as a couple of questions come to mind. Why the hell was I taking a cat for a ride, and why did I have the window open? Superfluous to say, she jumped out the window. I spent a whole day looking for the cat but never found her. I am not proud of this moment.

A Dog’s Life

Two minutes into my marriage, I insisted we get a dog. Some people pick the wrong partners; I pick the wrong dogs. I dragged my husband to a local rescue organization housed on a farm. The cute little pooch I chose marched right up to a grazing horse to say hello. Happy I found a dog that gets along with all animals; I was taking him home. My husband had a different thought. He knew that any small animal that would stare down a horse was not an animal that anyone would want near a child. Furthermore, the dog was a pit bull. I was heartbroken, but maybe that dog would not have been the best pet.

Next was a trip to the Greyhound shelter, and home came a 5-year-old brindle Greyhound. I didn’t know much about the breed save for the fact that they raced and were not treated so wonderfully. Our dog had the name Sunshine which we changed to Daisy. Rick didn’t really like that name. He thought, with a dog named Daisy, I couldn’t name a kid after a flower too.  Lucky for him our final child was a boy, or he would have been named Rosy. 

Racing greyhounds are super strange animals. They have lived in cages their whole pre-adopted years, so they do not know how to live cage-free. They have to learn how to climb stairs. They also need a fenced-in yard to run. I found her racing record, and it was not good. There is nothing more breathtaking than watching the dog run. However, nothing is more breathtaking away than chasing your escaped greyhound a mile to catch her. 

The Bus Should Not Have Stopped Here

Daisy was a weird, strange dog, but we loved her. Sadly we only loved her for a year. One night she just took an evening run and dropped dead. Later, I read about the famed racing horse Seabiscuit who died young from racing too hard as a youngster.  So, even though we did not fork out the money for an autopsy, I’m convinced that is what befell young Daisy.

I dragged my husband to the Philadelphia Dog Show a few years later. The first dog I saw was a Welsh Terrier, and I fell in love with him. I took the card of the breeder. I was about 12 months pregnant with an active 15-month-old in tow. Practically the next day, I jumped in my car and drove 3 hours to some Godforsaken Pennsylvania town in the middle of nowhere and picked up a Welsh Terrier puppy. My husband blames me for getting this dog. However, he let an about-to-pop hormonal pregnant women choose a dog in a nano-second. 

We named the dog Putter. This cute little ball of fluff was Satan’s dog child. I gave birth and then had three babies, 2 of them human. Those first weeks of my son’s life were a PTSD-inducing war zone.

Something had to change. Depending on the day, I was getting rid of the dog, my husband, or one of the kids. Ultimately the dog went. We needed a second mortgage to pay for everything associated with this creature, including an implanted chip that had to be secretly converted so there would be no contacting the new family that adopted him. All this work In case we changed our minds and became the plotline for a TV movie of the week. The breed rescue organizations are no joke. 

Third Time’s the Charm

Next came Sam the Pug. I saw a Pug on the street one day, and my husband did not say, “No dog.” Reading the room has never been my strong suit as I took that to mean that we found the dog of our dreams. I drove up to NYC with my four and five-year-old to a Pug Foster home. I should have grabbed the kids and ran when I saw all the dogs were wearing diapers. I assumed it was because it was an apartment, and hard to walk all the dogs together. We loved crazy Sam for eight wonderful years, but there wasn’t a spot in my house where he didn’t pee. 

Dogless, I went to a neighbor’s house who had a new puppy. It was a breed I had never heard of called a Lagotto Romagnolo, loosely translated to an Italian water dog. Next thing I know, I’m contacting the breeder, and off I go to Deleware to pick up Riley. This time I wasn’t pregnant, just impulsive.  

It’s quite obvious that research is not my go-to mode of operation. If I looked at more than Riley’s cute face, I would have discovered that breeders do not usually keep a puppy for eight months. Riley was the unpick of the litter. She is a water dog that hates the water.

Riley is still part of our family but is a pain in the ass. She has a slew of bad qualities, but we reluctantly love her. She is a bully to little dogs but is scared of her own shadow and big dogs.  She craves petting but whines while you pet her. For some bizarro reason, she is deathly afraid of large Poodles. Dog irony is that to the untrained eye, she looks like a Poodle. The first time we came across two large Poodles on a walk, she just laid down and played dead. To be fair, giant Poodles are frightening, especially those with that scary shaved look. 

All Creatures Great and Small

My oddball pet stories do not end with a bunch of dogs and a random cat. Since having children, I have lost a hermit crab and a hamster. The lost crab was the fault of my son. It was my daughter’s crab, and while she was at preschool, I let him play with the crustacean. I was making lunch, or more likely playing on my computer, and I told my 2-year-old to watch the thing. Of course, being two, he found some other interest and bye-bye crab. We never found him.

The Hamster’s disappearance was even more disturbing. I put the darn thing in a plastic ball to run around while cleaning the cage. The bedroom door opened, and the little guy got out. When I went to grab him to put him back in his cage, I found the empty open ball at the bottom of the stairs. Never found him, although I had many nightmares about when we did.

Cat’s Not in the Bag

We do now have a cat. The cat and I had a rough start. Routinely I let the dog out at bedtime when the cat decides to escape. Not sure why Blaze chooses to do it at midnight when I am the only one awake. I had flashbacks of my first cat, so out I would go at 1 a.m. chasing the cat while screaming his name. I did this for a few nights till I decided to risk the disownment of my family for a good night’s sleep. The cat showed up first thing in the morning in one piece. This is how I realized we have a pseudo-outside cat. 

Stuck in the house doing jigsaw puzzles and not making sourdough bread during Covid, I, along with the rest of the world, decided I wanted a new dog. As of this writing, no new animals have entered our home. With one kid off to college, one more on the way, and an imminent move to another state, we have been a bit distracted. 

Talk to me in a year.