I have come to the conclusion that it is very dangerous to be a pet in the Young house. Countless cute little beasties have met their unfortunate demise at the Bates Animal Motel located in our home.
I first discovered our ability of adding tragedy to the pet world early in our marriage. Angie and I were living in Idaho at the time. We enjoyed having a variety of cats and dogs around the house. Even the neighborhood animals felt comfortable around us. This was the case with the neighbor’s large fluffy grey cat. On summer days we would leave to bedroom window open for fresh air and the cat would come into our room and we would often find him curled up on our bed. One evening I heard the window slamming down in our bedroom followed by Angie screaming.
“Derek! Get it out! Get it out!”
At the same time, I started hearing a loud squalling coming from the outside of the house. I ran into the bedroom to find Angie hysterically pointing at something moving behind the window curtains. I approached the object and pulled back the curtain to reveal about 3” of grey furry tail projecting into our bedroom from the bottom of the closed window. It was moving around like an orchestra’s conductor’s baton on crack. I ran outside and found the neighbor’s very irritated and wide eyed cat hanging by its tail from the widow about two feet off the ground.
The look in that cat’s eye told me that it would not be a good idea to try to pick it up and remove the tail from the outside unless, that is, I would like to become the latest attraction at Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum, The amazing, shredded man.
I ran back in the house and opened the window and in a flash, the cat was gone. I asked Angie what led up to this tragic event and she told me.
“I was going into the bedroom, and I thought I heard someone coming in through the window, so I slammed it shut through the curtains!”
The next day I went to the neighbor to apologize for maiming their cat and was told.
“Don’t worry about it. He’s a stupid cat and that’s what he gets for being friendly.”
This statement explains a lot about why most cats are quite aloof and have straight tails. The now kinked tail cat survived his encounter with us but would never step foot on our property again.
I watched it one day walking down the street with its “Z” shaped tail held high, looking like the protruding arm of an electric streetcar. When it reached the beginning of our yard it crossed the street and continued, looking over suspiciously in case that crazy lady came out to try to customize any other part of its body.
Another of these unfortunate animals was Harry. Harry was just as his name implied. He was a long-haired guinea pig that Marisa inherited from her best friend’s family. Harry lived in a cage in Marisa’s room and seemed content. The children would take him out and play with him and then forget to put him back. I would deduce this fact from the little round “Harry pellets” that he would leave as he wandered around the house. I suppose he left them there in case he got lost so and all he would have to do is follow them back to the relative safety of his cage. It was these pellets that led to his unfortunate demise.
One late summer morning Angie had told Marisa to clean out his cage. This, of course, was a very silly request as everyone knows, children only promise to take care of pets to get their parents to let them keep them. Marisa simply moved Harry and his pellet filled cage outside where mom wouldn’t see him, let alone smell him. Now the shadiest spot was along the house on the rear driveway. Unfortunately, Marisa did not figure in the rotation of the earth and the fact that the shade would move. It turns out that that spot turns into a blast furnace for approximately thirty minutes every day.
Angie and I had gone back to the hospital that day to bring our newest addition, Tristan, home as he had to spend his first night under an ultraviolet light due to a slight case of jaundice after being born. We had left ten-year-old Marisa home alone, this was in the days when you could do that sort of thing and not be turned into Child Protective Services, so she went out to the cage and took Harry out to play with him. What she found was a totally limp and equally lifeless Harry. She dropped the little guy and ran into the house to tell us. She then realized we weren’t home yet, so she called up her best friend’s house in a panic. All she got was their answering machine, so she left the following message.
“I left him out in the sun! He’s dead! I killed him!”
Of course, when they played the message back, they thought she was talking about her newborn baby brother and they proceeded to panic and frantically try to call us as it appeared we now had a miniature female type Hannibal Lector on our hands.
After we settled the confusion and sent the SWAT team home, we held a very somber funeral for our beloved furry friend and buried Harry in the backyard.
I have often imagined that if there ever is an archeological dig done in our backyard, what the archeologists would think as there would be a large quantity and vast array of animal species found. All the remains, of course, would be victims to the special kind of “love” for animals that exists in our family. This was not the last we saw of Harry though. A week later the dogs dug him up and had a ball rolling around in what was left of him, spreading little Harry pieces all over the yard and under the deck.
Another tragically loved pet was George, the finch. He was a cute little thing and the family loved to hear his happy little songs emanating throughout the house. As usual, the children loved to try and play with any pet, and this included George. They would open his cage and talk to him and were delighted when they would get him to sit on their fingers.
Unfortunately, our children have an issue with doors. They have not been able to grasp the simple concept of closing them. Many a time would I walk around the corner and find a smiling child sitting on the porcelain throne or find the front door wide open on a 105-degree day as the electric meter ran mad and the air conditioner strained to keep up.
So, it was no surprise when we came home from a trip to find the door to George’s cage open with its occupant long gone. The children were frantic, and I calmly told them to just fan out and search the house and we will no doubt find him. As I was searching the den I noticed our little house dog, Sassy, was on the couch chewing on what I thought was one of her chew toys. Then I remembered that she didn’t have any white feathered chew toys. I yelled at her to drop it and I picked up poor George and examined him. His head was covered with Sassy slobber, but he was still alive. I gently smoothed his little feathers out and talked to him soothingly as I placed him back into his cage.
A vigil was kept at his cage side by the children for the rest of the evening, but George had had enough and turned his little feet to the air and assumed room temperature. Another somber funeral service was held in the pet cemetery in our backyard concluding with a song set to the tune of “Poor Judd is Dead” from the musical Oklahoma!
“Poor George is dead, Sassy chewed on his head.”
We had one parakeet who tried to give us a hint that we were not the best caretakers of pets. During dinner we heard it start squawking and we looked over to find the little thing trying to hang itself from the mini blind cord it had pulled into its cage. We gave that suicidal little bird away to Angie’s aunt before it could make another attempt at taking his own life.
Our boys loved lizards and our home became a temporary stop to many scaled little reptiles. One year Angie and I came back from a trip to Hawaii and gave Ben a carved coconut in the shape of a monkey head. He thought it would make a great conversation piece in his lizard cage. Little did we know that carved coconut monkey heads must be very offensive to lizards as the next day it appeared that all the occupants of the cage unanimously decided to commit mass suicide. Either that or all coconut heads from Hawaii are heavily treated with pesticides. Several more holes were made in the backyard in another somber ceremony.
One year we had two large Cuban anole lizards. We had a custom-made large display cage for them, and they were very popular with all the kids and their friends. The boys would take them out of the cage and carry them around on their arms or shoulders much to the delight and/or horror of many a visitor to our home, depending on their tolerance of all things scaly.
The decision was made to add several smaller lizards to the enclosure for a variety of species. Unfortunately, we discovered that the favorite snack of the Cuban anole is anything smaller than itself. We added the little lizards and watched in horror as they were gobbled up one by one. The anoles soon fell ill, and we had to put them in the freezer. This was at the suggestion of the local pet store. It appears they tell this to all their customers to help increase replacement lizard sales. Add two more holes to the backyard.
The next occupant of the enclosure was a large iguana by the name of Iggy. He had a great, but short, life. His days were spent under the sun lamp or riding around on the shoulders of Ben causing panic among any female that was visiting his master’s mother that day. Iggy met his own sad fate at the hands of Angie. Benjamin was back east for a month visiting family and Angie oversaw Iggy’s care. She dutifully kept fresh lettuce and vegetables in his food bowl but forgot all about his need for water. She finally approached me and spoke.
“I don’t understand what Ben sees in that large lizard. All he does is sit on the tree branches and he never moves. He doesn’t even touch his food!”
On closer inspection I found that poor Iggy had expired quite a while ago and he was just stuck in frozen pose on the branches. We buried him out in the front yard as we had run out of room in the back.
There were many other reptiles that temporarily called our home theirs. “Speedy” the lizard, who could run very fast on his hind legs, hence the name, had the bad habit of escaping quite frequently so that pandemonium would again inhabit our home until the escapee was recaptured. It seemed that all the scaly critters we had the joy of knowing would find their way out of the safety of their enclosures and into the dangerous world of closets, the underside of furniture and the dark spaces of our home. I can’t recall a joy known greater to man than that of finding a snake coiled up in your shoes as you try to put them on.
We also had an assortment of the usual pets in our home. Dogs and cats have always been around. These animals had more of a normal lifespan as they were a little larger and harder to kill than the others; this is except for one unfortunate black kitten. He made the fatal error of curling up on a black sweater at the bottom of the step from the bathroom just as Angie was coming out from the shower wrapped in a towel. This tragic event led to an extensive therapy session for Angie that involved vast quantities of vodka. Angie never could wear fuzzy slippers again.
Then there was the large black and white long-haired cat that a customer of mine gave us. He was a friendly cat. He would spend most of his time hanging out in the front yard and was always good for an occasional petting or back scratching session. He developed a bad and eventually fatal habit of sleeping on top of the dual rear tires of my work truck.
One hot summer we were all away on vacation at the family cabin in Oregon and we had left our house and its four-legged menagerie in the care of our friend’s teenage daughter, Michelle. When we returned home, I found a large note taped to the front door that said.
“Derek, call me as soon as you get this! Michelle”
When I called her, she explained that tragedy had struck when we were gone. She said that about a week ago she heard Dave, one of our employees, come over to take my truck to work and when she came out a few minutes later she found the cat dead, laying on the driveway. I assured her that she was not to worry about it as the cat obviously had spent the previous evening in the company of the local female feline floozies that plagued our neighborhood and most likely was sleeping off a long night of catnip, whiskey, and wild, wild women when his poor choice of sleeping quarters caught up with him. I asked her what she did with the body and she said.
“Oh, I put it in a box in the garage.”
“Great”, I thought to myself, “it’s been over 100 degrees all week!”
I was not prepared for the exquisite odor that met me when I entered the garage. It knocked me back out the door, but I took a deep breath and forged ahead. As I looked around through my watering eyes in the garage that was filled with boxes of Angie’s now very aromatic treasures, I realized that I should have asked for more details as to the location of the flattened cat’s impromptu coffin. I followed the stench trail and finally noticed a fluffy black tail sticking out of one of the old oak antique milk crates we got at a yard sale last year. Due to the heat the cat had apparently melted and had become one with the crate, so I took the whole stinky thing out and put it in the back of my truck. I informed Angie about the sad affair and told her I needed to run over to the shop to dispose of the remains before the kids saw or smelled it. I put the box into the dumpster and headed home to help unload the van.
The next day, Conrad, another of our dear family friends who happened to also have his shop in the same complex as mine, came over to tell me about some fool who put a melted cat in this beautiful old oak milk crate in the dumpster.
For the most part these larger animals would live in a feast or famine type of existence, as it was always a guessing game as to when they would be fed. To the children they were viewed as self-sustaining playthings that never required the care and attention that was promised to the parent figures. To the parents they were viewed as occasional companions and, depending on the size of the animal, full time depositor of tootsie rolls, cigars, or presto logs in places that people walk.
Buddy, our Pekinese, was doing his “dooty” to uphold the standard of quality for parental annoyance to his dying day. He had aged and had the unpleasant habit of imitating a miniature goat’s ability to deposit potty pellets while walking across the floor. I would find a trail of “Buddy pellets” in a neat row showing not only his direction of travel but if you calculate the spacing you can figure out his relative speed.
I once witnessed this glorious event during a gathering of friends at our home. Poor Buddy didn’t even notice the ongoing deposits as he shuffled across the floor. I yelled.
“Buddy!”
He just turned around and looked at me and then at the neat line of tootsie rolls across the floor with a look of “where did those come from?”
One of the many cats that blessed us with their presence was Dracula, a male Siamese that had severe mother separation issues. He would get into the children’s beds after they were asleep and suckle on their necks leaving little “cat hickies” This led to several intense phone calls from the parents of the kid’s friends who would spend the night only to fall victim to “Drac” the phantom neck sucker.
Bedtime at our home during this time was always signaled by Ashley bursting into melodramatic anguish at the first mention of going to bed. At the first cry of despair Drac would run off into the living room and hide under the furniture to await his prey on their way to their bedrooms. He would run out from his hiding places to attack the tasty little ankles going by. The kids would cower in the hallway waiting to make the mad dash through the living room of death. They would grab pillows or books to fend off the attack and they resembled a group of sadly deformed spin bifida victims shuffling across the room while franticly waving random household items around their feet.
Cinder and Brutus were a mother and son team of dogs that occupied the backyard for many years. They were good dogs for the family and grew old and happy in their fenced in kingdom. We would occasionally take them for walks around the neighborhood much to the delight of Cinder but not to Brutus. Brutus was a good-looking dog, strong and muscular with a long-tailed Rottweiler look about him. If any other unauthorized animal would dare to come into his backyard they met with a swift and usually fatal end. Several of the neighborhood cats made the one-time mistake of venturing into Brutus’s domain. Our cats were accepted and protected by him but any four-legged strangers were fair game.
One day one of the children brought home a tortoise as a pet. He lasted only until he was left in the backyard and Brutus decided that he was a threat to the family and turned him into a chew toy.
Despite his imposing appearance, Brutus was a devout coward outside of the back yard. When we would take him out for a walk with his mother it would turn into more of a dragging session than a walk. At the end of this exercise, I would usually be the one to carry this four-legged, eighty pound, pansy back into the backyard.
The years eventually took their toll on Brutus and Cinder as Cinder developed epileptic seizures and Brutus would lose all power and control to his rear legs. The decision was reluctantly made to take them to the vet’s for a humane termination of their pitiful conditions.
This sad task fell to our oldest daughter, Marisa, and her new husband, Daren. We made the appointment at the pet hospital and Marisa and Daren took them there at the appointed time. Stares of disapproval met them from the tree hugging animal worshipers behind the reception desk as they carried these decrepit animals in.
They were escorted into an examination room to await the vet. They placed Cinder and Brutus on the floor where Cinder went into her normal seizure and Brutus collapsed into a heap.
Much to their amazement the dogs suddenly recovered and assumed a four-legged, tail wagging stance just as the vet entered the room. He asked,
“So, what brings you here today?”
“We need to have these two dogs put down” replied my daughter.
The vet looked at these two obviously healthy and happy beasts and said “Are you sure? They look very healthy to me.”
“Oh, no” replied Marisa, “They both are suffering, Cinder is having seizures and Brutus can’t walk anymore.”
Of course, during this conversation, the old dogs are happily scampering about showing the vet that they are perfectly fine and these two would be assassins are out of their minds.
As the vet reluctantly left the room to get the injections for the dogs they again collapsed in to a quivering mass only to revive again as he entered the room and administered the fatal doses.
Marisa and Daren, these two angels of death, left the clinic with the now two deceased victims of their obvious cruelty in a leaky cardboard box as they felt the stares of hatred and loathing from the veterinarian staff boring into the back of their heads. They left the dogs in the box in the back of our SUV for me to plant into the animal orchard in our back yard.
There was one dog, however, that lived with us much longer than most. Her name was Sassy. Sassy was with us for over 15 years. She was a dachshund/Chihuahua mix with an obsession with food. It was amazing how much food this little beast could put away. It was as if it was her last meal and yet she still stayed relatively skinny. I assumed that she was actually a tapeworm in doggy clothing. If anyone had any type of food you could count on Sassy being right next to them with her bugged out eyes staring intently and shaking her whole body in anticipation.
One time she was next to me during dinner and I held up my paper napkin and asked her if she would like a taste. Of course she stood on her hind legs to signal her approval of the offering so I dropped the napkin and she had it two thirds of the way down her throat before she realized it was not what she expected. Pandemonium again ruled as king in our home as I now had to perform a doggy type Heimlich maneuver on the wide eyed little glutton to dislodge the napkin.
Besides her food obsession Sassy was actually a very good little house dog. As with all small dogs, she maintained her position of top dog among the cavalcade of beasts that paraded through our lives with vicious ferocity. On one occasion I was out in the driveway when a large Doberman pincher approached me. Before I could even react a miniature black and tan blur raced by me and, with the ferocity of an enraged she-devil, chased the intruder away. It was almost comical to see this large, well muscled beast running for its life from this bug eyed holy terror that appeared to be intent on making it its next meal.
Sassy was also the self-appointed nurse of the family. She had this incredible ability to sense when a family member was getting ill. She would not leave the side of anyone that was sick but would stay there right next to them until a full recovery was made. She was also very protective of her patients. We have a picture of her lying on the back of our daughter, Ashley, as said daughter was face down in the bathroom worshipping the porcelain gods Ralph and Roy during a very intense bout with the stomach flu. Sassy has her fangs barred and fire was shooting from her eyes as she perceived an ominous threat from the digital recording of her mistress’ distress.
For such a fearless protector of the family it was odd that Sassy seemed to always be thinking that her little life was about to be snuffed out. Besides always begging for food she was also always cowering down in fear and submission, often with a trail of yellow liquid behind her as a peace offering. I often told Ashley that when Sassy died, I would have her stuffed in her normal crouched over position with one of her rear legs slightly raised and a small yellow puddle under her quivering backside.
This animal had some serious mental issues and surely would make a perfect poster dog for doggy Prozac. We could always tell when Sassy would find some unattended people food and dispose of it in her typical starving wolf fashion. Her little body would inflate to almost twice her normal size leaving her almost high centered on her belly with her little legs barely contacting the ground. When this happened, we would simply put her outside in case of explosion and wait and see if she deflated back to normal size, which was usually the case in about 24 hours.
Sassy’s greed for food ultimately led to her unfortunate demise. We had a gathering at our home and some of the kids left several servings of McDonald’s French fries out on the deck. These were of course irresistible to our little four-legged garbage disposal and were promptly devoured with gusto. Little did we realize that Ronald McDonald was the doggy grim reaper in disguise. The rapid intake of this toxic meal was too much for the now 15-year-old dog and she once again inflated to football size for the last time and went to the little doggy vomitorium in the sky. The usual solemn funeral service was conducted and another future discovery for the archeological team was placed into our underground animal kingdom.
Our current menagerie consists of Jack, a 90 lb. boxer/pit bull mix and Moose, a 180 lb. Great Dane that thinks he’s a miniature poodle because all he wants to do is sit on your lap any time he can. We also have a variety of cats that come and go as they please because, as we all know, you don’t own cats; they just allow you to feed them.
Shortly after we adopted Moose from a family that ran out of room to keep him, we discovered his love of Chihuahuas. I was in my office in the back yard and saw him and Jack standing at the rear fence tilting their heads in wonder as two of the neighbor’s Chihuahuas viciously voiced their displeasure at their presence. I went out to them and was greeted with the sight of two little mussels sticking out of a small space under the fence snarling ferociously at their perceived threat to their doggie domain. As we all know, Chihuahuas have the “small dog” syndrome that makes them feel invincible and usually results in their tragic demise at the jaws of the much larger and less patient breeds of dogs. As I stood there, Moose gave two sweeps of his massive paw to the opening and enlarged it enough for the two yapping beasts from Hades to stick their heads through and continue their assault.
I went back to my office and looked up from my work to see Moose’s head slowly lower down to the opening for a closer inspection of these little demon dogs. What followed recalls the scene from the movie “Jurassic Park” when the Tyrannosaurus Rex lowered his head to make the little snack of the lawyer seated on the toilet. As Moose’s head came up, I noticed that dangling from his mouth was the highly animated wiggling body of one of the Chihuahuas as Moose had him by the head. Before I could react, Moose flipped his head to the side and launched the little thing spiraling into the air only to grab it as soon as it hit the ground and launched him again in another direction. By this time Jack was bouncing around with the expression of “throw it to me!” all over his face. I rushed out and put a quick stop their little game of catch and the now slobber covered, and totally hysterical little creature made a beeline back through the opening to the safety of his yard.
Today, they just do their normal hysterical barking through the fence while making sure not to stick any body parts trough the fence for Moose to play with. I wondered what caused Moose to do that as he is an extremely gentile giant and never showed any aggression to any other animal he meets. Then I suddenly remembered that in the picture that the previous owner had sent me when we were thinking of adopting him, Moose was sitting with his favorite stuffed toy in his mouth. It was the “yo quero Taco Bell” Chihuahua doll.
I would have to say that the most unusual pet we ever had was a small “snake” one of the neighbors found in their garage. They called up the house to ask if we could send Ben down to capture it. Everyone knew that the Youngs were animal people. They never knew that we were the Addams family of the animal kingdom. Ben went down and returned with a small snake like creature and Angie put it in a jar and sent the kids out to get leaves and twigs to make it more comfortable. I was away on a business trip so they called me to inquire of my great knowledge of animal husbandry as to what species of snake this might be. Their description didn’t fit anything I was knowledgeable about so I told them I would have to wait to do a thorough examination of the creature when I returned in two days. In the meantime, I told them not to handle it until I could make sure of the species.
Angie and the children spent their time watching this new member of the family through the glass jar and even went to the point of putting it at the dinner table so they could look at it while they ate. Two days later, when I returned, they proudly presented me with their amazing find.
They anticipated that they would be hailed as the discoverers of a new and exotic snake species. My examination revealed that this creature was about 6” long, with a cauliflower shaped head. It resembled more a worm than a snake as it had no scales. After getting more information about where it was found, I, being the final authority of all things scaly, announced that their discovery was in fact quite a rare find. This little creature usually is not observed outside of its normal habitat which happens to be the colon and lower digestive tract of most canines. Yes, my family had discovered, picked up, sheltered, and entertained at dinner a large tape worm that the neighbor’s dog had deposited on the garage floor.