How growing up with pets was a pain in the behind

WE had a good laugh the other day, my brother Lindani and I. It was about a meme I shared with the heading: ‘Teacher gave him homework to draw a cat’. It was of a child holding down a live cat onto a piece of plain bond paper, trying his best to trace its outline. Part of some ridiculous homework, of course!

I know schools have opened and parents will be made to jump through hoops, go through all sorts of contortions to assist their kid’s homework. That is in addition to the embarrassment suffered when the said parent’s ignorance is glaringly exposed. I have judiciously ducked helping on any Maths homework. My being dim in that atrocious subject is legendary.

But it’s the subject of pets that I am on about here. I must admit that the meme brought back memories about my own childhood. I admit that I did attempt to trace our pet dog, Smirnoff. Tracing was in fashion back them. There was that translucent paper that our parents were forced to purchase. Almost at gunpoint. But it was, of course, an exercise in futility.

Smirnoff, a German shepherd so named because of my late father’s association with the spirit, and the bottle store business he was running, was always the target of our ridiculous antics. It’s a miracle that my brother and I were not bitten at all.

We used to ride him like a horse, those being the days of cowboys and Indians. But do not take my word for it, Smirnoff would bite anybody else, especially if one wandered into our yard. He was particularly ruthless with cats. And people’s behinds!

The Alsatian was to have scores of successors of all shapes and sizes. There was Scruffy and Benjamin. These were of the Pekinese variety we always wondered how they saw through all that fur. They were cute, but were a challenge to keep clean. The more the reason our mother banned them from entering the house.

Just to add that she also hated cats with a passion, though she was later to drop those moratorium years after we had left home. I will blame it on age. I should add that her later relationship with her dogs took a pleasant turn. She converses and reprimands them like they were human. And they understand what she is saying. Well, sort of.

After a spate of break-ins, we purchased the latest addition to the family. It came in the form of ‘Fluffy,’ a ball of black and khaki fur that could barely scare a fly. The reasoning, nevertheless a bit warped, was that Fluffy would grow into the job. He never did. If he ever had the chance, he would have accompanied any burglar in the house unharmed.

I don’t know what you think but having a pet, a vicious one at that, is a necessity. That would obviously translate into the canine variety…in other words, a very big dog. My father, in his later years, kept Great Danes the size of a calf, and all named Bruno. The first one was fawn in colour. When he died, he was replaced by Bruno 2, who was black.

Bruno was so named after a certain politician who is now late. He shall remain nameless to protect the innocent. It was a sign of his adoration of him to whom we were related. Bruno 2 was sadly put down by city council park rangers who found him wandering outside the yard at night.

His crime, not having a collar. Bruno hated dog collars. My father was distraught at the overzealousness of the park rangers. With thieves ruling the roost in the suburbs, it has become more than a necessity to have vicious dogs as guards.

Our family has a chequered history of owning pets, some, I must add, quite involuntarily. We once had a rat in our kitchen. It must have been a rat because our six-year-old Anele had announced that he had seen a mouse that hadn’t had a bath. The rat in question placed the family in a dilemma.

We were faced with two choices. Either to bait him with rat poison and send him straight to rat hell or just to pretend he was part of the family. And adjust food budget accordingly of course. But he went for the wardrobe and decimated several garments.

We could have killed him or her, but we had the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Rats to contend with in the form of our boys. You see this rat was so big that he just could be classified as a pet.

It was so big that the kids unanimously agreed that it was a rabbit. And you should have heard the wails of protest as I chased it around the house with malicious intent. My argument was that being the breadwinner, I could never get to make drastic cuts to my monthly beer allocation.

The other option was to upgrade the pest to pet status. That meant coming up with some gentleman’s agreement with the rat in question. Firstly, he had to agree to be a gentle-rat and stop causing havoc in the kitchen. Secondly, that the rat would have to adjust its diet somewhat to decent food and not my magazine collection and clothes in the wardrobe.

Unfortunately, the so-called rat-rabbit (as evidently opposed to calling him a rock-rabbit) had developed an expensive taste, which explained his weight problem.

The other dilemma was the many a sleepless night that the rat-rabbit’s nocturnal habits caused. Because of its size, it could no longer sneak out through the tiny hole it came in. So, in the dead of the night, one could hear it burrowing away.

It was as if it had lost direction burrowing through any wooden surface he came across. At one point I thought it had discovered my centuries old vinyl record collection. Remember those flat, black, round objects that made music when you set an electrified gramophone needle on them? In the end, quite sadly, some very painful choices had to be made.

We just had to commit murder most foul and break our kids’ little hearts, or swallow our pride and elevate the rat-rabbit to pet status? I argued that I was yet to see a guard rat, granted the mere sight of this chap would surely keep uninvited relatives away. So, he had to go, thanks to some highly effective rat poison.