All of God's Creatures, Including Slugs, Hamsters and Killer Frogs

My daughters are ten and eight, and an extremely dangerous situation this morning got me thinking about all the pets we've had in the last decade.  More than our fair share, I'd say.

First, this morning.  I found a huge (I mean super sized, probably antibiotic resistant nuclear powered) slug slithering along our outdoor fireplace.  So, like a dumbass, I called the girls down to see it.  They were willing to accommodate me, especially since they were getting ready for school and in various states of undress (re, naked).  Ew! Cool! We moved on with our lives. I was upstairs, brushing my teeth and cleaning the mounds of toothpaste out of the sink when my eight year old hollered up the stairs, "I brushed my teeth already" (yes. I see that you also brushed the bathroom sink.  Thank you.) "Oh, and Mama, I caught the slug. It's on the table."

"Why?" I wailed.  "Why would you do that?" But I got no answer.

In addition to the monster slug (which I now can't find), we also have a frog.  Someone gave my daughter a little aquarium for her eighth birthday (who would do that? Bad people.) So, of course we couldn't just fill it with grass and an imaginary frog-- the best kind of frog to my mind.  We had to have the real fucking deal.  Well, that frog outgrew the little plastic aquarium and had to go into a big glass one.  And with all that room she (Alyssa Faith) seemed kind of lonely.  So we bought her a friend.  Who she promptly ate. Then Alyssa died. Larry found her, post mortem, and called me. "You better replace her now," I said. "We cannot repeat the hamster situation of oh-nine." So he replaced her that day with the same kind of frog, and we told them the other one died. One out of two ain't bad. So we have a new frog, and if I call her Alyssa Fake, the girls don't notice.

Alyssa Faith escaped from the aquarium the first night we put her in it. I was sitting on the couch, and I felt goose bumps begin to rise, and I got that feeling you get when you know something really terrible is about to happen. I looked at the floor, and there she was, halfway to me, a murderous glint in her beady, froggy eyes.  Our damn dog (just one at the time-- more on the dogs later) didn't even notice the killer headed straight for me. Alyssa Fake escaped from the aquarium once.  I have a clearly stated, contract signed, repeated over and over rule that no one is EVER to hold Alyssa Fake unless the door to the room she's in is closed, locked and barricaded.  Someone forgot the rule.  "Mama," my daughter calmly informed me. "We can't find Alyssa Faith."

"Larry! We've got to move right now!" I screamed. Luckily, the frog was later found. By that time I was comfortably living in my new, pet free house. The children aren't allowed to visit. They can stand outside and wave.

The hamsters.  The hamsters were probably one of our greatest pet tragedies.  The girls wanted hamsters for Christmas.  That's all they wanted, swear to God, just hamsters we'lltakecareofthempleasemamaweloveyousantawillsayyesweloveyouweloveyou. We generally go to Iowa for Christmas, and anyone who thinks I was going to drive nine hours with live rodents in the vehicle is out of their g-d mind.  So, the girls got a fancy hamster cage and a letter from Santa stating that it was against the law for Santa to transport live animals across state, let alone country, boundaries, but that this letter would serve as proof of payment for the hamsters they were to pick out from the pet store just as soon as we got back to Ohio and Mama got better anti-anxiety drugs.

So the very night we pulled back into Columbus I was forced at little girl gun point to the pet store. As they picked out their small hairy rats (They both wanted females. The pet store person said it's impossible to tell what sex they are. I told the pet store person just to say that any hamster they picked was a female.  Duh, pet store person). It's also, it turns out, impossible to tell if they are pregnant and in the early stages of labor.  More on that later.

We spent more than a hundred dollars on hamster accoutrement-- more cages, balls, toys, treats.  We took the hamsters home, where they began their little hamster lives in earnest.  Several nights later, we were awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of our dog Ali (we got him at the pound when he was a puppy) whining very excitedly.  One of the hamsters had gotten out.  The chase was on.  We saved the hamster.  Then, the next night we walked in to give them their treats and found some extra, hairless, white little nasty hamsters in the cage. I called the pet store.  Ooops, was basically their response.  And also that we needed to separate the non-mother hamster from the mother hamster and the babies or the non-mother would eat the babies. Yummers. So we snatched out the hamster we believed to be the non-mother, stuck her in a hamster ball, and took her to the store with us (I'm not sure if we thought she/he couldn't even be in the same house?) At the store, my family went to the hamster aisle, while I stood at the counter with the hamster in the ball.

"Can you just check to make sure we got the right one?" I asked the girl. She did.  We didn't.
"Let's go, people!" I yelled through the pet store. "We brought the wrong one. We left the killer with the babies!"

We gathered another seventy-five dollars worth of hamster crap, and took off going sixty miles an hour down a residential street.  We got home and the babies were still there in their white, hairless nastiness. We did the necessary switches.  But the babies died anyway.  And then the mother died.  And then, to try to assuage the other hamster's grief, my daughter gave him/her a sucker.  He/she died, too. No more hamsters.  Ever.

We've lost more than our fair share of fish. At one point our aquarium caught the plague and they all died-- some fish we'd had for years.

We had a bull mastiff for a short time.  A huge, red dog named Brooklyn we'd found in Winton Woods in Cincinnati. We were walking along the creek in the woods, and the dog was under a tree, across the water, watching us.

"Oh, my God, why is she here?" I asked my partner.

"She's been here," he said.  He'd seen her before as he drove through the park on the way to the girls' preschool. I used his cell phone to call the SPCA, and they informed me that they knew she was there, had known she was there, but they didn't have the manpower to come get her.

"We're taking her home," I informed the kids.  They didn't look all that thrilled about this massive dog, bigger than they were by a hundred pounds.

I told my partner to keep the girls on that side of the creek, and I crossed over, talking quietly to the dog.  She watched me, seemingly interested, until I got within a few feet of her.  Then she stood up-- she was huge-- and began to bark at me. Oh, crap. I'd left the only cell phone on the other side of the creek and now I was about to be eaten by a bull mastiff without even the comfort of dialing 911.

"OK, baby," I kept saying, backing away.  I walked to the top of the hill where the woods met the road and watched her.  And she watched me. My family began the trek back to our van, but I couldn't leave that monster dog there. "We're leaving," I told her.  "If you're coming, come on" and I started walking.  Every few steps I'd glance back and there she was, following me at a distance. My partner opened the back doors of the van and she jumped right in when we got there. She was coming.

Brooklyn was an awesome dog.  The girls slept on her, they rode her, we took her everywhere we went.  After a few days, I had no doubt she would never hurt the girls.  However, she would hurt anyone who tried to hurt us.  Or, you know, talk to us. Or approach our house.  As a matter of fact, she'd prefer if you stayed off our block all together, thanks.  Our neighbors were horrified and terrified.  They stopped letting their kids come near our house.  We couldn't have people over-- no one liked our Brookie.

Eventually, we had to give her to some people with a farm in Iowa (this is not a euphemism-- we actually took her to a farm in Iowa).  We had little girls and a little house, and it got to the point where we couldn't move anymore, because Brook took up residence right in the middle of the living room floor. Not to mention we'd become pariahs in our neighborhoods and families.

We hadn't learned our lesson about pets as Christmas presents.  Last year the girls got a brand new puppy. I guess we figured we've had pretty good luck with keeping dogs alive and happy.  Ali is six-- he's happy, healthy. 

Yesterday my eight year old came home with a book from school: How To Care for Your Pet Rabbit.

"No," I said.

"Listen," she said.  And she read to me all about her new pet rabbit.

"No," I said.

"Yes, Mama," she said. "When we move to our new house." And she continued to read.