Pet theories

My sister-in-law recently told me about some friends of hers who tried to “adopt” a Chow-Chow from China. They had it imported here, got all the necessary paperwork accomplished, had the animal delivered through Philippine customs. They brought it to their home, where it got itself acclimated for a few days. But the couple was surprised to return home one day and find the helpers beside themselves in terror: “Ma’am, the dog… he’s walking on his hind legs!” said one of the helpers.

It turns out the “Chow” they bought was actually a bear.

That they mistook a bear cub for a Chow-Chow is hilarious. But if you compare features, there is a passing resemblance. Having the pet rear up on its hind legs must have been the deal-breaker for these would-be Chow owners. Maybe if it started juggling and riding around on a unicycle, that would have been another sign that this guy belonged in a circus, not a sala. But one wonders how many so-called “domesticated” pets are really just one step away from the wild.

I tell myself this story whenever I consider getting a pet for my daughter, Isobel. Because she suffers from asthma at times, we have been fending off the usual “Can I have a dog/cat?” requests by a determined six-year-old. When she heard the Chow/bear story, Isobel cleverly remarked: “They thought it was an aso, but it was an oso!”

Yes, and osos don’t make good house pets, dear. Watch The Bear if you don’t believe me.

Then there’s the case of Travis, the TV chimp. Travis performed in a lot of commercials in the US before retiring, and was then owned by a Connecticut woman who saw nothing unusual about having a trained, full-grown 300-pound male chimpanzee wander around her household. The chimp occasionally grew depressed, reports say, so the owner had been giving it Prozac (apparently sanctioned by a veterinarian). Well, anyway, Travis must have had a very bad day, because he ran amok eventually and — sorry to say it — tore the face off its owner before being gunned down by local police.

Again, some pets are better off left to Animal Planet.

Since we didn’t want a dander-carrying pet around our daughter, we eventually found a reasonable compromise: a pet turtle.

Isobel took to the turtle quickly, and even devised a faux-garden type environment for the turtle’s tank: rocks, shells, a length of stick to navigate around. But the thing with turtles is they don’t provide a great deal of regular thrills. Sure, it was fun watching the turtle wedge itself between a couple of rocks every day, then trying to back itself out. We especially liked the way “Cutely” (my daughter’s name for the turtle) would lurch its way up onto the highest rock every morning and preen its neck out into the sun in a pitch-perfect imitation of Mufasa from The Lion King. The turtle also had this odd habit of perching precariously on a rock, then leaning against the glass tank and falling asleep. We began to think it had narcolepsy.

But such entertainment is short-lived with a turtle. Turtles are remarkably faithful to their image: slow and steady. We would place Cutely down on the floor and encourage him to escape. You could grow a beard waiting for a turtle to get its act together and make a run for it. Again, though, the fun only lasts so long.

The koi fish didn’t last long either, because their outside garden tank was in a prime dining location for a local stray cat, who managed to scoop up one or two a week. Birds were also nixed as a pet of choice, again, due to the feathers and asthma situation.

Not to make my daughter feel jealous or anything, but I did have some unusual pets of my own, growing up as a kid, including shrews, gerbils, rabbits and a pet monkey. The last was a squirrel monkey that my dad purchased secondhand in one of his many whimsical transactions. He might have traded a set of socket wrenches for it, cage included; I’m not quite sure.

Now, squirrel monkeys are not the sort of animals that can strike fear into the hearts of anyone, not even squirrels. Unlike the rabid rhesus monkeys of Outbreak (if that movie had existed in my childhood, we never would have gotten a monkey), squirrel monkeys are tiny, with black mouths and a white fringe around the eyes and little outward-bent ears. They seem perpetually nervous, and our pet monkey — we called him “Malo” — had a habit of leaping onto any familiar person’s head whenever a stranger entered the room. He would hide behind your head, or perch on your shoulder, until the intruder was deemed safe to be around. This little guy probably wouldn’t last a day on Animal Planet.

Subsisting on fruit and nuts, sometimes insects, squirrel monkeys are reminiscent of the Philippines’ own tarsiers, minus the Don Knotts bug-eyed look. They’re cute, and we had him as a faithful pet for about six years until he got a fatal bout of pneumonia one winter (New England winters are hard on these South American creatures).

Now, cuteness is a factor that seems designed to save some animals from extinction. Take the kittens that have turned up in our garage recently. The one making with the heartbreaking “meow” every morning is probably waiting for its mom to come back with some grub. But there’s just something heart-tugging about a kitten; it’s like kryptonite to humans. On some cellular level, kittens probably know how damn cute they are; they know that, even if Mom doesn’t come back with some fresh rodent for lunch, they can rely on the bleeding hearts of people, whose sales resistance is very weak, to provide them with a regular saucer of milk. (Why else would the wayward mom deposit this brood in some human’s garage?)

Yet I couldn’t help noticing that the kitten has a rather fierce striped coloration, resembling a much larger feline, and I couldn’t help being reminded of comedian Chris Rock’s rap on Siegfried and Roy whenever I heard its pitiful yelp. As Rock said about the near-fatal attack on one of the Vegas tiger trainers: “Everybody’s mad at the tiger. Talking about, ‘Oh, that tiger went crazy.’ That tiger didn’t go crazy; that tiger went tiger. You know when the tiger went crazy? When the tiger was riding around on a little bike with a Hitler helmet on.”

Yup. That, and a Chow-Chow standing on its hind legs. One more reason not to adopt a pet in the near future.