Pets Grow Old and Die - What's the Use?

I've never been much of a people person. I don't like them and they don't like me, which is why I once thought pets might be a suitable alternative to human relationships. After all, a good pet won't nag you for spending the entire weekend on the couch drinking beer and watching sports, it won't make your life miserable if you forget its birthday or the anniversary of the day you brought it home from the pound or woods, and if, God forbid, you mistake the sound of your urine on the bathroom tile floor for the toilet bowl while half asleep in the dark, it will let you clean it up at your leisure without making a whole federal case out of it.

Sadly however, in yet another example of God's cruel sense of humor, pets, unlike humans, grow old quickly and drop dead like flies. Even someone who keeps only one pet at a time will have to grieve the deaths of half a dozen or more of their best friends over an average life span. Who needs that kind of misery?

My first pet was a box turtle I saved up to buy from a pet store when I was eight. I named him Superman. One night Superman ran away from home, and though he only made it halfway down the block by morning, when I got him back home he stopped eating, and a week later he was dead as a doornail.

They say pets can be good for your health by decreasing your blood pressure and stress, but there was nothing calming about having to toss the shell containing Superman’s lifeless, emaciated, withered green body into a garbage can. In fact, it was quite troubling. Not quite as traumatic as my experience with my first dog, but it was heartbreaking nonetheless as Superman’s untimely demise constituted my first brush with not only death, but suicide.

When I was ten, my parents surrendered to my incessant begging and let me take a Labrador Retriever home from the pound. I named him Lucky since he was lucky I came along and saved him, but I felt just as fortunate to have him as my new friend. For an entire summer we bonded and played, laughed and loved. I walked Lucky to the park everyday for games of Frisbee and catch, I gave him baths and fed him myself each morning and night. We became really close, but perhaps too close, because when my school started again in the fall, Lucky wanted to come along, and he found a way under, over or around every fence, gate and obstacle put in his way to trail after me. Yes, Lucky was a regular escape artist – he got out of the yard every day for two weeks to track down his master and best friend before, tragically, his luck ran out and he was hit and killed by a cable van. At least that’s what my mother told me. Later on I found out from my older brother that they actually gave Lucky to a rancher who had lots of open land he could run around in.

Since Lucky, I’ve owned three other dogs, two cats and dozens of fish, all of which would be pushing up the daisies now if their corpses hadn’t been disposed of in either an incinerator or down the gurgling mouth of a toilet.

“But what about the good times you spent with all your pets? Don’t they make it all worth it?” you might ask, and I would respond with a resounding, “No.” Because they’re gone now, and I’m miserable. I can’t even think of getting another pet because I’ve been burned too many times. Whenever I looked the animal in the eye I’d be wondering when his ephemeral mortality would betray me. It is hopeless.

No, all my furry, scaly and fishy friends are gone forever, and I’m still here – surrounded by the traitorous disappointments that comprise my family, haunted by the idea that they will all likely outlive me, chuckling at the bittersweet irony that people say the death of a pet is a valuable experience for preparing you to deal with the death of a person when, if there was any justice, the opposite would be true.