Pet
Lelanthran Krishna Manickum
December 2011
Fred was impressed. Fred was hardly ever impressed, so this really was a very rare occasion indeed. To make the event even rarer, Fred was impressed by Emma, his wife of three years. Emma hardly ever posed any problem that Fred couldn’t outwit, outflank or generally outrun, but this time, down to blind luck, Fred found himself in a corner from which there was no retreat. And, to make things worse, Fred loved Emma very much and found it very difficult to actually hurt her feelings intentionally, and so here he was, stuck with a thorny (not to mention smelly, very friendly and waggy-tailed) problem that might not go away for another nine or ten years.
Fred hated dogs. Emma loved dogs. Dogs also loved Emma. Unfortunately they also seemed to hate Fred, regardless of how ingratiatingly he approached them. “This was,” Fred thought, “a love-triangle-horror waiting to happen.” He regarded the labrador in front of him. It appeared, to him, to be grinning. This is how all labradors always look anyway, whether they are in a good mood or not. Even a rabid labrador always has a warm and welcoming smile on it’s face, even just before it tears your throat out. Fred, who routinely kept away from dogs, did not know this however, and it seemed to him that the dog was experiencing much joy in seeing Fred out-manoeuvered.
Fred had routinely vetoed the acquisition of a dog, a Canis lupus familiaris, a wolf in wolfs clothing, an eater of scraps, a digger of lawns and a destroyer of afternoon slumber. He had held firm in the face of Emma’s occasional hints about getting a dog. He had carefully constructed arguments explaining why they didn’t need one, and maintained a list of iron-clad rebuttals to Emma’s often incoherent and unstructured arguments about why they should get one. Fred had every answer to every argument put forth by Emma.
She’d say, “But honey, dogs are awfully good at keeping the home safe,” and he’d reply with “With the armed response, my dear, it’s more likely that they’ll attack the security firm’s first responder. The armed response guy can’t save us from being killed in our beds if he’s out fighting Cujo on the lawn, dear.”
Or, she’d say, “Honey, a dog would scare away the birds.You know how you hate it when they come round and eat the first seeds of spring in the flower bed,” and Fred would reply with conviction, “Not a problem, my dear, for this year I got some protective netting along with the seeds when I was down at the nursery last week.”
Or, she’d say, “With all the jogging you do, a dog would be perfect. Honey, a dog would protect you while you jogged, and keep you safe and sound until you got back home to me,” and Fred would reply, “Of course, it would mean that I would have to jog with a big stick to ward off any other dog that wanted to fight it. Hardly a good thing, dear, to be running very fast while holding a big stick. Sooner or later someone is going to see me running towards them with a big stick and a barking dog, and they will get the wrong idea, and before you know it, you will have to bail me and Mutt out of jail. I’m not yet ready to be arrested as a mugger.”
She had given up, eventually. Even lovable women like Emma had to give up sooner or later. Although, at the mall a few months ago, she had made one last ditch, almost heroic effort, to get Fred interested into going into a pet shop to have a closer look at a puppy. Unknown to Fred, Emma had observed him scratching a kitten behind the ears. She had observed his small smile at the kitten, and the playful banter. Then, last week she had handed him a birthday present which had spread out claws and dug them firmly into his arm while meowing softly. Fred was thrilled.
Fred, it had turned out, was a cat person. Cats appealed to his nature. Fred liked an animal that did not bother him for displays of affection. An animal that was mostly quiet and did not dig holes in the garden to hide bones that it was never going to remember to dig up again. Cats, in Fred’s opinion, were the ideal pet. They kept to themselves usually, and were solitary creatures anyway and so wouldn’t be coming home with a pack of semi-domesticated wolf-friends. Hell, you could even forget to feed the damn thing and it would get by just fine by stealing the neighbour’s dog’s food. You forget to feed a dog, you have one hungry dog. You forget to feed a cat? Well, then you have just saved yourself the price of one can of catfood.
And, of course, dogs hated cats too, didn’t they? So, Fred thought that at least the cat would satisfy Emma’s longing for a pet, even if this one wasn’t a pet that wagged it’s tail at you, or caught frisbees, or howled at the moon. Fred would have his peace and quiet, and Emma would have her pet; one which was hated by dogs everywhere. Dogs hated cats, didn’t they?
Yes, they did! Fred watched the reaction from the closest neighbouring dogs in disbelief when the kitten tumbled playfully outside into the garden in the morning. The racket was just awful, a cacophony of different barks all vying for attention at the same time. The poor kitten, scared out of its wits scooted back inside and had an accident on Fred’s newspaper, which was carelessly left behind closed doors on top of the table in his study. This was a whole new problem; the dogs were going mad each time they noticed the kitten outdoors, and if they kept this up, Fred would never read his morning paper at breakfast in peace again. Besides, the kitten couldn’t grow up indoors. It had to go out sometime.
It was Emma who decided what the solution should be. “We have to give away Miss Purrfect,” she announced to the morning paper, behind which hid her husband. “Honey, I know you love her, but that cats gotta go. If we don’t do something, Harry next door might take it into his head that he’s back in the Congo and shoot the poor thing.”
Fred, not usually at the top of his debating skills in the morning, and decidely worse this morning due to the shaking his nerves had gotten when Miss Purrfect had wondered outside, cleared his throat and attempted a rebuttal. “Errr...” he managed, before realising that he hadn’t a single rebuttal.
“We can get a good home for her,” Emma continued, “shouldn’t be a problem. We’ve only had her a few days, after all.”
Fred tried again to think of something to keep the cat and silence the dogs, but failed miserably. All he managed to do was squeak out a horrified “No!”.
“Okay then, what do you suggest? The cat can’t exactly bark back, and besides, that would just be twice the noise if she could.” Emma thought for a moment, “Could it be a territorial thing, Honey?”
Fred nodded. He’d suspected that it was. The neighbours’ dogs saw Freds Yard as a territory with no dog on it, and were okay with that. With a cat on the territory, they were driven to chase the cat off. A dog wouldn’t have had the problem that the cat had, after all. The other dogs would consider the new dog to own the territory. Fred told Emma this.
Emma sighed when she heard his explanation, “Okay, how about we borrow a dog from the shelter and let it mark the yard?”
Fred was surprised at how quickly he said yes to this. Just now they’d been talking about giving Miss Purrfect away, and so when presented with an alternative that would let Miss Purrfect stay, he had grasped at it with all the foresight that drowning men use to grasp at straws.
The labrador had been brought in later that day, allowed to meet with Miss Purrfect and then let loose in the yard. The labrador had explored the garden and had then taken great care in watering as much of it as his bladder would allow. Although there were a few suspicious sniffs from over the fences, the other dogs were all quiet. Then Fred and Emma let Miss Purrfect into the yard. Nothing. No barking at all from the other dogs. Obviously, the idea had worked. The dog was taken away, back to the shelter. And there was no outburst of indignant barking from the neighbouring gardens at all when Miss Purrfect went out. None, that is, until it rained on the fourth day. When Miss Purrfect had marched out on the fifth day the dogs were barking harder than ever before. Fred could even hea
r one of the dogs howling! The rain had washed away the scent of the labrador!
That settled it. The labrador was purchased from the shelter that very day. The very same labrador, answering to the somewhat idiotic (in Fred’s opinion) name of Laddie, that was now grinning foolishly at Fred and occasionally glancing hopefully at the frisbee lying next to him on the couch and then back to Fred to see if Fred had noticed. Miss Purrfect was worrying a little rubber ball around the room, so Laddie eventually gave up on Fred and went off to see if the ball would play with him as nicely as it played with the cat. Unexpectedly (well, unexpected to Fred, at any rate), the house was quiet and peaceful. Perhaps dogs weren’t such boisterous and noisy creatures after all.
Anyway, Fred was impressed. Emma had spotted that one opening for her to have a dog, and she grabbed it. Pure luck, but still ... it was impressive how he was out-manoeuvered in that way. He wasn’t going to worry about it though, luck always ran out, after all.
… Meanwhile, in the kitchen Emma was taking out the trash. She examined the dog whistle in her hands. “It was true what they had said down at the pet store,” she thought, “Humans cannot hear this thing at all.” And then she tossed it into the trash, tied up the trash-bag and took it outside.
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Warm Regards
Lelanthran K. Manickum