MindSpinner

My daughter wants a Teacup Yorkie. Her friend is raising them. She plans to carry it around in her purse. It will live in her room, and she’ll always take care of it, and I will never, ever have to clean up after it. Somehow this will be true even though she’ll go off to college in four years. No doubt it won’t bark, either. It sounds like an animated fashion accessory.

Am I going to fall for this? No! Not this time. The kids and I already have a cat, two short-legged Jack Russells, a geriatric ferret, and two goldfish swimming around in a large planter half buried in the garden. Do I sound like a slow learner, or what?

Take the cat. Now, the fact is that I adore the cat. He’s three years old and has an enormous talent for getting ever fatter no matter what low calorie, high cost, vet-prescribed diet he is fed. I adore him even though he has summer allergies and asthma and is currently recovering from a case of pneumonia, such that I’ve just spent $300 on medication and testing and will be giving him medications twice daily for a month, which may as well be a life sentence for both of us, as you understand if you’ve ever tried to medicate a cat. He’s getting very good at popping pills out with his tongue. I’m getting very good at popping them back into the side of his mouth and holding his mouth shut until his swallows. He is just good enough not to scratch and fight, unless, of course, I’m trying to get him into his carrier for a trip to the vet. The other day, I was succeeding in total incompetence, with scratches to show for it, when my daughter took over, swaddled him in a towel, and popped him into the crate - no trouble at all. Her cat proficiency extends to all manner of behavior management issues. She gives the cat a bath whether he likes it or not, holds him as long as she wants, and dresses him up for kung fu lessons.

She’s not so keen on daily pet owner chores she vowed to do when she was politicking for a kitten. As far as that litter box that I would never ever have to change because she’d do it every single day, well, right now you don’t want to know. Thank goodness for Arm and Hammer Super Scoop litter. The stuff is potent enough to allow me to hold out until she gets back from her dad’s this afternoon, when I can make her clean it out. But when the cat gets sick, cat vomit is mine, all mine. Likewise the vet bills.

I don’t care how cute that Yorkie puppy is, and no, I don’t want to see it. I know my weaknesses.

Two of my weaknesses are asleep in crates in the garage. Short-legged Jack Russells make incredibly cute puppies and indeed heart-winning dogs. Their talent for winning hearts is, however, clearly a survival mechanism designed to ensure that all the trouble they get into does not result in doggy homicide. They are brothers, the last two puppies sold from a litter. Who could separate them? I bought them for my son, who had deeply loved the family Sheltie. His bond with that dog helped him weather childhood, and I thought these two pups might help him weather adolescence in the wake of his parents’ divorce. Turns out girls are more relevant these days than dogs. Foreseeing that should have been a no-brainer, but then he’s my first adolescent.

The dog with two eye patches is deaf; the dog with one eye patch doesn’t listen. Neither successfully crate trained, despite my assiduous efforts, so home for them is pretty much the dog pen behind the garage. This was a carefully researched and designed dog lot, big enough for running around. Jack Russells are known to jump, so the cedar fence is five feet tall. The slats are close together because the deaf dog barks a lot, apparently for the sheer joy of moving his mouth. (The hearing dog, who has to listen to his brother barking, appreciates silence and almost never barks.) I figured that the deaf dog might not bark at what he couldn’t see. Jack Russells dig, so I had a plan for that, too. I bought PCV-coated wire fencing and had it tacked to the bottom of the fence, with the lower edge buried under the sod.

I thought I was smart, but these dogs are smarter. Moreover, they love romping through the wide world beyond their confining dog pen. Thus began a drama in which they play Hogan’s Heroes while I begrudgingly assume the role of Colonel Klink. The chicken wire is a joke on two counts. They tear it out of the ground and then dig under it. Better yet, they chew through it. They chew through the lattice under the deck, too, where I’d planned for them to have shade. I’ve lined the deck lattice with different fencing they can’t get their teeth through. I’ve carried rocks from all over and lined the inside perimeter of the fence with them. I’ve learned that these rocks should weigh nearly as much as the dogs themselves if they are to do any good. The dogs, for their part, have enjoyed many, many glorious romps in the wide, wide world, while I’m ever in search of ever bigger rocks.

The deaf dog, who is the friendliest, most adoring little personality you could hope to meet, has cultivated the habit of barking at night. Not just part of the night, but really as much of it as you could hope to sleep through under the best of circumstances. We can report, however, that a $99 Citronella anti-bark collar really does work and could be the best purchase a dog owner ever makes. The dog wears it at night. Neither dog wears a collar in the daytime. It would be nice for them to have tags when they go romping in the wide, wide world, but they believe in cooperative chewing, and each will systematically chew the collar off the other and then they’ll play tug of war with it.

The geriatric ferret is very little trouble, really, except for the cage cleaning and the incident in which she got lost before the builder got the last register over the last vent in our new house. We looked for her for three days and found her when I thought to check the crawl space. She’d gone adventuring in the ductwork and wriggled out through the furnace. She’s had cancer and survived. She’s lost all her hair and grown it back. She lost her best buddy more than a year ago when he escaped into the wide world and never came back. She makes a kind of chortle chirp for joy when she’s let out of her cage to play. She’s a friendly little pound and a half of moxie, all covered in fur.

The goldfish please me and give me a reason to go out to the garden each morning to drop a few flakes of food into their water garden. They swim to the surface and devour the flakes. By chance, they are precisely the same orange gold as the daylilies planted behind their pot.

Question is, do we need one more endearing, adorable, bothersome, expensive little character in this household? The answer is no, no, no.