Pet Sounds

Spring is here.   For Gerad Manley Hopkins,

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; 

For me, spring is cleaning tomcat piss out of the house.

Every spring, Tomcats come in, twriling their whiskery 'taches, only to be disappointed by our neutered cats.  In sexual frustration, they mark their territoty with a "i could've if I'd wanted to..." message written in foul-smelling musk.

Our cats don't much like Tomcats and they don't much like the food we give them.  Rather than eat the frankly rather nice-smelling tinned crap we offer, they go off to get better food elsewhere.  Much better food.  It's not unusual for them to return home only to sick up pheasant, smoked salmon and plovers eggs all over the house.  It's a sad state of affairs when the best food in the house is the cat sick.

Cats are crap - any vermin they catch are outweighed by all the songbirds they tuck into.  £600 vet bills do not work in their favour either.  The bastards.

I fail to see the purpose of pets.  They can't be eaten or milked - their only products are copious amounts of piss, shit, vomit and hair.  They have no value whatsoever.

It could be argued that pets provide comfort and warmth to lonely people.   But so does masturbation - with the added advantage that unless you're doing some very specialist masturbation, you're unlikely to end up with a garden full of shit.

We had a dog when I was a kid.  It was a Brussels Griffon that we had adopted when its owner died.  It looked like a hairy woodlouse with a punched-in face.   Like all dogs, it had a range of unpleasant habits - rolling in fox-shit, eating fox-shit and then trying to share the fox-shit with humans.  But its worst habit was in the car.   During a journey, it would pace up and down the parcel shelf.  It had associated the ticking of the indicator with stopping.  When the indicator went, it would get all excited.  But when it realised that we weren't stopping, it would snort in exasperation and blow a spray of dog snot over whoever was in the back seat - usually me.  It was a shit dog that only ever did one useful thing when it took on a rat the same size as itself and won.  The fucker - I'd backed the rat to win.


Dogs are crap too - the questionable joys of dogging are somewhat diminished by having to swing a little bag of dog shit as a come-on signal.

Another dog issue is that I won’t have anything in the house that can lick its own bollocks.  The jealousy eats me up.

Rabbits are crap - they start to think that they're human and then go psychotic and annex large areas of the house.  Ever met someone who has a house rabbit that *doesn't* have it's own room  - a room that the homeowners are scared to go into?  Seriously, invite a rabbit into your house and before you know it. it'll be doing more illegal invasions that Tony Blair.

Fish aren't even pets - they're just things that move in water.  Turds bobbing in a ditch are just as visually stimulating.

Just about the only decent pets are Hamsters. They're great - but not for the usual cute, fluffy, bollock-chopped nonsense.  Nor for the Richard Gere reasons.   No.  Hamsters are great because they invariably shit themselves to death within a month and so teach your children all about mortality.   How much easier it is to explain death when the hamster has shown the way.

Hamster fact - all hamsters are descended from one family caught in the Syrian desert in the 1920s.  That's a gene pool so small that the Forest of Dean can only gape in multi-fingered envy. This fact is, in fact, a fact.

Hamster fact -  There's so much inbreeding among hamsters that they're natural banjo players. You can get special hamster banjoes on eBay. Less of a fact, this one.