Now the trouble with dogs is …
We had a dog once upon a time – this would have been Riley – who took an instant liking to me. I walked in the house from work one day to discover a dog happily wagging its tail and following at my feet around the kitchen.
I didn’t pay much attention. We already had a dog – good, obedient, affectionate Max. I thought this other dog belonged to my sister-in-law. She was visiting. She and my wife were sitting at the kitchen table.
“He’s ours,” Barbara suddenly said of Riley.
I think I muttered, “But we already have a dog! What are we going to do with a second?”
It was a done deal. Max, a Shih Tzu like Riley, was nearing the end. We got him as a pup. He was now a geezer. Barbara had talked vaguely of finding a replacement before Max’s time came. Riley was the replacement dog.
I don’t know why, but Riley attached himself to me. We were best friends to the day he died three years ago this past summer.
Riley joined a household with Max the dog and a cat named Chippy. Chippy came on tip toes out of the high grass that paralleled the house. She was a wee thing. We fed her. Or maybe we put out a bowl of milk.
Feed a kitten and you got a cat for life. That was in the spring or early summer. By winter she was inside. We took her in. It was awfully cold out. We felt sorry for her.
Chippy never set foot outside again. She permitted us to live with her in the house for the next 19 or 20 years.
Chippy was not always easy to get along with. Purring one moment, she might bite your hand the next. She was unpredictable around us. Around strangers she was could be vicious. Hissing. Biting. If they could even get near her.
Chippy’s been gone over a year now.
I’ll never have another pet. A dog, forever a 3-year-old, requires pretty much constant attention. And I like not having to clean Chippy’s litter box.
The litter box, full of clean litter, still resides in the upstairs office. Riley’s outside leash lies weather beaten on the sidewalk near the side door.
For some reason, I can’t get rid of either.
All of which raises the question, dog or cat? What’s your preference?
Cats? Many people loath them.
For one, there’s Peter Mara of the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center, who’s 100% for house cats, but wants the feds, no less, to declare open warfare on predatory street cats, of which there may be as many as 80 million scattered across the country.
(Perhaps a more realistic figure is between 30 and 40 million.)
These unwanted cats are basically wild animals, partly or wholly responsible for the extinction of 33 types of birds, Mara told Rachel Gross of Smithsonian Magazine.
According to Mara, cats kill 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals a year in the U.S. Street cats are the worst, killing three times more often than owned cats that roam at least part of the time outside the house.
Mara’s solution: bring those partial roamers permanently indoors and kill the others, since trapping and neutering does not seem to work in reducing the U.S. horde of alley cats.
(Adding to the worry over free-range cats is the potential for rabies and something called toxoplasmosis, which amounts to the transmission of a single cell parasite from feral cats to other wild mammals. Both rabies and toxoplasmosis pose possible human hazards.)
Euthanizing tens of millions of cats seem extreme. Imagine rounding them up. Talk about difficult.
Some people would take exception to the whole thing. Like Katherine Wu. Writing recently for the Atlantic, she rhapsodized about cats’ “luxurious fur … their super silent, bean-padded paws … their scritchy-scratchy tongues….” She and her husband, she said, were capitalized “Cat People,” declaring it’s truly “meaningful” to win the “trust and affection” of such finicky characters.
I see I’m running out of space here, but this is more about you than me. Besides, what’s the worst that can be said about dogs, other than the obvious?
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently, of Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.