Pets then and now
I mean, growing up, I could never have conceived of the idea of pee-pads for teacup-sized dogs, easily spread out on the floor so some tiny, quivering slip of a dog can do its business indoors.
One end of my mother’s long Halifax garden was set aside for the rhubarb. The other end, back past the flowers and the herbs? Well, that was reserved for pets.
Buried pets. Just two cats, I think. A dog? One was hit by a car; others, well, vanished, and Mom wasn’t always big on answering questions when dirty deeds were done after dark. The occasional newborn kitten that died after being birthed in our laundry basket — many, many, many of the legion of gerbils. At least two hamsters — but wait. I think the mummified escapee hamster that turned up inside the compressor of the deep freeze just ended up in the trash. A box turtle, a loonie-sized slider turtle with red spots on its cheeks.
They were all out there somewhere. I often wonder if some later owner of that South Street house dug up that corner of land and ran into a bone garden, a veritable strata of Wangersky pets.
(The floating guppies — no matter how many died, there were already more breeding to replace them — just went down the toilet.)
I can’t see that happening now, and not because there’s some new municipal ordinance against home pet burials, nor a squad of bylaw officers checking newly turned earth with portable ground-penetrating radar.
No, it’s just that, in the past few years, pets have somehow turned a corner.
There have always been faithful pets who you loved and cared for — who didn’t bathe at least one wandering feline or hound for fleas, all the while scratching rising, itching welts of one’s own?
But pets today live in a different world.
I mean, growing up, I could never have conceived of the idea of pee-pads for teacup-sized dogs, easily spread out on the floor so some tiny, quivering slip of a dog can do its business indoors.
Nor, 20 years ago, could I have possibly imagined the plethora of foods that the common cat might have as options: low-ash, high-protein, some with duck, some with bison, some with duck-and-bison-and-pomegranate. All ruinously expensive. (OK, I made up the pomegranate. Or maybe I didn’t. I can’t remember.)
And vets? Yowza. If you ever wanted a cogent argument for medicare, all you have to do is lug Fifi or Spot to the local vet clinic for a series of diagnostic tests, let alone an operation, and you can watch the bill for lab work, prescriptions and other costs spin faster than the numbers on the gas pump.
I’m not saying it’s wrong. I once paid hundreds of dollars for surgery to remove a tumour from a cat’s neck — a tumour apparently caused by the feline leukemia shots we had faithfully been getting for the thing.
All I’m saying is that pets have become big, very expensive business.
I understand our soft spot: I regularly get up at night and turn on a bathtub tap so that a howling, aged cat can drink water in the manner to which he’s become accustomed — from the dip near the drain, water dishes be damned.
But my mother would have met an $800 or $900 vet estimate — along with the requirement of specialized, expensive food for the rest of its doggy or kitty days — with a much more trenchant response. “Kittens are cheap.” Maybe we’re in a kinder place. Or maybe we’ve just become a target market.