80’s PETS

I thought about making a list of every pet I’d ever had. Mostly because I was thinking about how pets in the 70’s -80’s seemed to live their own lives a bit more than these days. You got a cat. It may get out and disappear for a month or three. It came back. You still had a cat. Really I don’t know that I need to write much more about this. 

I put my phone down to let the dogs out after giving them their twice a day medicine in bespoke “pill pockets” as somehow these little wolf bastards have evolved beyond a pill in a piece of cheese. I decided to push forward on this post. 

I love our dogs and would have a couple more if my wife allowed. Growing up we almost always had a dog. Sometimes a cat too. As a high school and early college kid I liked to give pets as gifts to my dad. Once I put a kitten in the little box they put it in for transport from the mall pet shop next to Alladin’s Castle where I purchase it and wrapped it with wrapping paper, running quickly to the other room to give it to him. SURPRISE!  That cat was horrible. Possibly due to claustrophobic trauma. Likely because it was a cat. I switched to dogs. 

A couple years later my then girlfriend and I ventured out to the “bad part of town”, read poor, to buy a puppy we saw in the classifieds. We convinced the person selling to give us two for $30 and proceeded to crawl under the house as that was the catch. They lived under there. 

We brought home a couple half breed Catahoula mix puppies, a cattle dog breed indigenous to Louisiana. Indigenous implies they always lived here. More accurate would be bread and developed here to chase livestock and or trespassers.  We packed up one of them and took it East to surprise my dad...again, with a gift that would cost him thousands of dollars and live for at least a decade. Truly the gift that kept on giving. 

Today, there are four different beds for my two dogs to rest themselves upon should the need arise, in whichever room they choose. To be fair, while this seems luxurious, In 1982, the dog had seven rooms of lush carpet to lie and pee on at their discretion so maybe today’s dogs aren’t that spoiled.  As my dogs main function has evolved from herding and attacking to sleeping, this all seems very appropriate. 

We don’t seem to have as many “outside” animals anymore as that’s deemed cruel. It may actually be cruel. I’m just saying that back in the day (ah, there it is), some folks had a dog 13 years and it never knew there was a dining room in their owners house, let alone an “upstairs”. And cats?!  Hell we had a cat once that disappeared into the woods by our house for three months to return unscathed for a week or so. Poor thing ended up returning to the woods only to get bitten between the eyes by some sort of snake and then returned to die in front of me.  Ten year old me  forced to inadvertently absorb the circle of life in a brutally linear fashion, as my dad suggested I put it out of its misery by using a box, the tailpipe of the running car and the shop vac hose as some sort of cat gas chamber. I, hysterical, balked. He suggested possibly hitting it with a brick. This paints him as uncaring.  Brutally pragmatic may be more accurate. He grew up in the age when Old Yeller was required reading. Google it young folk. 

The moral of this whole post is pretty simple. Cats bring great pain upon themselves and their owners and therefore...

I need another dog. 

#hugsandhi5s