On the Fifth Day of Blogging, Just Dusty Blogged for Me…

29/12/2016Dusty 1 Comment

An introduction to his familyyyyyy!

My wife and I speak for our pets.

I know this isn’t unique; maybe not even unusual. And though it may seem like it is to other people, especially the petless and those on the lower end of the imagination spectrum, it isn’t even strange or nonsensical: our pets, like any sentient thing, have personalities, and the clearest way for humans to depict that is to put it into words. We also do pantomime and funny voices for all of the pets, but that isn’t something I’m prepared to re-create on this blog.

So just the words will have to do.

What I have noticed over the years of speaking for my pets is this: my pets are smart. Very smart. Also kind of insane, but still — smart. The things they have to say, when we humans try to step outside ourselves and solidify their apparent perspective, are often true and even insightful things. This may be exactly because the attempt to speak in another persona allows us to step outside our own egos, and gain a new and perhaps clearer perspective; it may be because animals don’t care about the same bullshit that humans care about, and when you are speaking for an animal, it is impossible to speak like a human. It may be because I actually like animals better than humans, and so when I am speaking for them I tend, consciously or not, to make them sound like better people than human people generally are.

Though that last one isn’t entirely true. Because I speak for Dunkie, too, and he’s crazy. But also very sweet. And he don’t take no shit off of nobody, which is something that is not true for me, and which I admire and envy.

Regardless, whether it is escaping my own ego, or escaping a human’s perspective and a human’s baggage, or even if it is just that I want to make my pets seem like good people, it seems to me that their advice is worth listening to. So I’m going to be giving them a regular sort of column on this blog, and asking them what they have to say about the world we all share.

First, let me have them introduce themselves.

Duncan the Cockatiel:

Theoden Humphrey's portrait.

This is Duncan. He insists on going first, because he’s the oldest, and because he believes he is the most important.

YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT I’M THE MOST IMPORTANT! Yeah, that’s right — because it’s all about Dunkie. Oh! Right, yeah, introduce myself. Okay, LISTEN UP! I’m Duncan. I am named for a king. KING DUNKIE! I bring beauty into this house.

My feathers are pure white, and very clean and neat, because I spend the majority of my wakey-time grooming myself. I have a beautiful gold crest and awesome orange cheeks, and I whistle and sing and make kissy noises when I feel like it.

When I don’t feel like it, THAT’S WHEN I START SCREAMING!

I can be very loud. BUT ONLY WHEN THEY DON’T DO WHAT I WANT! I can’t help it. I’m very small and I’m stuck in a cage. I don’t have a lot of weapons. I can bite, and I threaten that a lot. Doesn’t seem to work, though. BUT THE SCREAMING DOES! Yeah, it works good. It gets a real response, you better believe it. They always think they can ignore me, BUT NOBODY IGNORES DUNKIE! Even though I’m a tiny little pretty bird, I AM A FOUNT OF RAGE! It never lasts very long, though. But the screaming can go on and on and on and on because nobody is as stubborn as a bird. But then they just cover me up. That makes me stop screaming.

But really, all they’re doing is making me swallow my rage. The screams don’t stop, they just go inside.

For now.

It’ll come back later. Rage always does. You better believe it, pal. Just as soon as you do something I don’t like. Yeah.

I’M DUNKIE!

Oh yeah — and I can be very sweet, sometimes, too. I picked Mama out special when she came into the pet shop where I was living when I was new. Birds are usually standoffish to strangers, but I walked right up to her and put my foot out, reaching for her shoulder so I could stand on her. I still like to cuddle and have her give me skritchies. And then I close my eyes and make the tiniest little peeping noise.

It’s almost enough to make you forget about the rage.

Almost.

This is Samwise. Samwise, also known as Sammy, also known as the Fox in Socks (the Spitz in Spats), is the middle child (we think — both his age and the tortoise’s age are somewhat in doubt.) and is the sweet one.

HEYYO!* I am Samwise! I am a goodwill ambassador, that’s what my persons say. These are my persons, my mom and my pop.

Toni DeBiasi's portrait.

I call them that because they took me in when I was in the joint. See, I used to have different persons, but they abandoneded me, and then I had to live on the street for a while. I came pretty close to starving to death, and it made me very scared and anxious. Then I got picked up and put in the shelter — but the dogs call it the joint, because though it sort of is shelter because you get a roof and food and water and stuff, you’re still locked in a cage, and you’re alone and scared pretty much all the time, which is why all the dogs in the joint bark a lot and act really mad. Because they’re scared and they don’t know why they don’t have a home any more, because we all used to have homes and persons, and then all of a sudden we don’t, and we’re in the joint.

The joint changes a dog.

But it didn’t change me!** Because I am super sweet, and very friendly and curious. (Though I still get scared sometimes.) I like everybody. I greet everyone and let them all pet me — I am very soft and fluffy. I never ever growl or bark, and I am not afraid of strangers — I like to stand up and pat them on the tum, because I like tum rubs and I think everyone should have tum rubs. My mom and pop think it’s amazing that I’m still so friendly and sweet, because I have plenty of reasons not to be, from my early life before I came to live here. But they don’t understand: that was all in the past. Now I have a nice home, and lots of food and tasty treats, and two persons that love me and will always take care of me, even though I bit my mom on the first day she brought me home because I got anxious and freaked out like I do sometimes, but they didn’t bring me back to the joint like the persons who took me home before them who only kept me for a week and then brought me back, or the ones before them who did the same thing (Pop says it’s because people suck, and because I have this thing they call tick fever from when I was on the street and it means I need to go to the vet and get medicine and tests and stuff and it costs money and the persons who took me home didn’t want to pay for me, but I don’t know what money is and I don’t even like the vet because they poke me with owie things but then they give me treats so it isn’t too bad but still if I could I would skip the whole thing and I’d really rather just have persons even if they don’t take me to the vet because all I really want is a home. And I have one now. So the persons who didn’t keep me before, that was just because they weren’t the right persons. I had to wait for just the right persons. And I found them!). So now I have a home, where I get to sleep in the bed, and I get two walks a day, and I get treats all the time, and they always pet me when I want them to and rub my tum and everything.

So why shouldn’t I be happy? See how nice persons are? Just look at my mom and pop! I think they’re awesome!

Okay I have to go now! Now you get to say heyyo to my outside brother! He doesn’t live in the house because he poops everywhere. I don’t know what the problem is. His poop seems pretty easy to clean up. But then I guess I’m not the one who cleans it. Anyway, he lives outside and he seems to like it. Okay bye!

(*Sammy’s greeting is pronounced like “Hello” with a Spanish “ll,” pronounced as a “y,” like “La Jolla.” It does not sound like Ed McMahon’s response to Johnny Carson jokes.)

(**Actually, it changed him quite a bit. When we brought him home, he weighed 25 pounds; he is now almost twice that, and has three times as much fur. Before and after:)

Neo is an African spurred tortoise. We named him Neo because he was a gift from our former landlady, and when I was looking up African names, I found that “Neo” is a gender-neutral name that means “gift” in Tswana. We pronounce it like the name of the Keanu Reeves character from the Matrix, though I am sure that the actual word is pronounced differently; but we love the Matrix movies, and I sort of like the idea that the tortoise is actually the messiah. The actual word for the tort is “calm.”

Hello. I’m Neo. I like food. Especially grass.

This was the new sod we got for him, and the fence that didn’t keep him out. (Photobomb by Sammy’s butt.)

Food is good. So is sleep. I like to hide so no one bothers me. Especially that furry guy (“HEYYO!”). He sniffs me a lot. He moves too much. And too fast. You have to take your time, because otherwise you might miss things. Like food. I eat pretty much anything. I can’t see very well, so I usually try to eat everything I can find. Then I sleep.

Sleep is good.

I have a shell because I don’t want to be bothered, but usually I walk around a lot and look for food. I can walk surprisingly fast, especially when one of the tall people come out and come near me, because they usually have food and I walk straight to them as quick as I can. Which is pretty quick. Not that quick.

Not as quick as the sniffer. I have an extra house, like a shell for my shell.

I sleep in there because it has a warm rock* that I like to sleep on. Warm is good. Sleep is good. I walk around every day and graze, and eat my plate of salad, and then I go and lie in the sun or lie on my warm rock and sleep.

*Warm rock=heated basking spot designed for tortoises. Basically a hard plastic tile with a heating coil inside.

Life is good.

What is this?

17/05/201504/06/2015Dusty 2 Comments

(Please note: throughout this piece, every use of “I” and “me” should be taken to mean both myself and my wife; we are equal partners in this endeavor. She has read and approved this before publication, and she has kindly let me speak for us both. It was just too awkward to keep saying “Toni and I.”)

This is the dog who lives at my house. The question is, what does that make me?

I call myself his father; I call him my son. But of course, he’s not that; we are of different species. He doesn’t look like me at all. I don’t treat him as I would a human son. He doesn’t eat at the table. He doesn’t wear clothing. He doesn’t have Legos.

My human son would have Legos. I would teach him to read, and to talk like a pirate. We would watch The Iron Giant and Monty Python together, and play Sorry and Parcheesi and War. I would learn to play chess so I could teach him.

None of these things are true with the dog. So he must not be my son.

The law calls me his owner; him, my property. But how can that be? The measure of an individual life, the distinction between an object and a person, between animate and inanimate, is sentience. Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive: the dog can clearly do both. His perceptions are markedly more sensitive than mine, in some cases.

Not in all cases, though. His sense of taste, for instance. Not only does he regularly chew up live, squirming insects of any kind that he can catch, he also picks up anything — anything — that might resemble food, no matter how remotely, while on his walk. Sure, he grabbed that discarded Goldfish cracker, and he tried to eat the doughnut that someone dropped and then ran over; but he also picks up bird feathers, cigarette butts, flower petals, balls of lint and hair, pieces of tar and plastic, shiny things, and the excrement of other animals. He also regularly licks the tile floor in the kitchen, for minutes at a time. I have doubts about the functionality and acuity of those taste buds.

But there is no doubt that he can feel. He misses me when I am gone. He is happy when I return. He loves to cuddle, and to play tug-fetch. He has trouble with anxiety: when I change my routine, it can upset him, and he — well, he freaks out. He starts moving and breathing quickly, and he tries to get as close to me as possible, nipping at me and whimpering softly, desperately; if he doesn’t calm down at that point, the next stage is a good five minutes of sprinting, at top speed, in and out of the room where I am, throwing himself as violently as possible onto the bed or couch where I lay, barking at every turn and biting anything or anyone who intervenes. Clearly he has feelings — prodigiously strong feelings. He suffers because of it.

The mechanistic paradigm would hold that these are nothing more than reaction to stimuli and conditioned response, and perhaps so. As such, they are no different from any of my feelings, about which one could make the same argument — I smile when he comes to me and rolls onto his back because doing so ensures me a pleasurable experience, namely rubbing his belly, which feels good to my fingers, lowers my blood pressure, and so on. Such affection is pleasurable because it signifies pack bonding, which helps to ensure my individual survival: for I have allies in the hunt and against my enemies.

Whatever. The point is, he is as sentient as I. I do not think he can be considered an object. Property. No more than I.

When I come home, he meets me at the door, wagging his tail, but he is not a jumper; he likes it when I come down to his level. I crouch down, usually with one knee on the floor and the other out to the side, and he curls into me, pressing his body against my leg and across my torso, and I put my arms around him and bend low to kiss his head, and he is surrounded and encapsulated by me. Each morning when I get up, I lay on the couch to drink my first coffee, and he leaps up to lay beside me, sitting in the space made by my sideways lap. He leans against me while I pet him, and if I use only one hand, he puts his front paw on the other one and tugs, as if to say, “Why aren’t you using this hand, too?” So I do. And he smiles. Within minutes he melts, oozing down to lie beside me in the narrow space I do not occupy, his long legs lolling over the side of the futon. Often he rolls onto his back, hoping that I will gently scratch his belly. That’s his favorite.

He wants to be in the room where I am, no matter what. As I move back and forth between kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom, he follows me, his chew toy in his teeth, laying down on the bed even for the half a minute while I put on my belt and pick up my shoes. Whenever I go to any door, he wants to lead me through it, the grand marshal of my daily parade.

So what does that make him, all of that? My pet? Too condescending. My shadow? Too stalker-y. My companion? Perhaps.

I call him my friend. My buddy. (I sing the song, which I learned by heart during my adolescence when the television burned at both ends.) And it’s true. But there’s more.

I named him. We call him Samwise — Sammy for short — after my favorite character in the same books that gave my name to my parents (Well, my second-favorite character, but really, The Witch-King of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgul is no name for a dog. That’s a cat name. Or a bunny.). I named myself for him, because I speak for him as I speak to him. I recognize that the names, like the words, like the personality and the voice that I have created for him (He sounds like Sniffles the Mouse from the old cartoons) are all and only of and from me, not from him; but he takes them on, for me. He lets me color him in. He lets me play with him when I want to laugh, and hug him when I want to cry, and always, he makes me feel better.

So what is he, to me?
Here’s why it matters, what he is to me; here’s why I’m writing about this. Here. This is the second time I’ve had a dog-friend-son. The first was Charlie.

Charlie died last year. He died because of a brain tumor. But really, he died because I killed him. I told the doctor to poison him, and I held him while he died.

If Charlie was my son — and just as I do with Sammy, I called him such, called myself his father; my parents called him their grand-dog — then I would not have done this. I would have fought that tumor, would have put Charlie on the medication, gotten him the CAT scan, talked to doctors about surgery, about chemo and radiation, about prognoses and time and quality of life.

If Charlie was my property, I wouldn’t feel badly about his death. When a possession is broken — and that tumor broke him, at the end, sent him into grand mal seizures, caused apparent blindness and confusion and loss of equilibrium and loss of bladder control, and I can’t imagine how much pain he’d have been in had we not had him on analgesics — you throw it away. Maybe you miss it, but you don’t regret throwing it away. I didn’t even throw Charlie away: I kept his ashes in a white box, high on a shelf, with his collar beside it, and the Christmas ornament we got for him, embroidered with his name.

But I feel badly about Charlie’s death. I regret the decision I made, even if it was the only one I could have. I know it was the only one I could have made, and the actual decision took almost no time; there was no question that it was the right thing to do, none at all. But I wish I hadn’t had to make it. I still wish he was here. I miss him. I loved him. I still do.

If he was my friend, then his death at my hands makes some sense. He was suffering. He was losing himself, and every day that he lived would have taken him further away from who he was. When you face that, it may be your friend — your buddy — that you ask to pull the trigger, to pull the plug, to end it.

But I’ve had friends. I have friends. None of the other ones live with me, and even when they did, I never, ever scratched their tummies like they liked. There’s a connection here, a trust and an intimacy, that friendship does not include. And, more, there’s this: the truth is, I don’t know if Charlie wanted me to have him put to sleep. He didn’t ask me for that. He didn’t decide.

I decided for him.

If I had a human child with a terminal illness, at some point, I would make the same decision — though I might decide differently. But still, I would decide to keep fighting or to let go. I would. Not the child. And I would never make that decision for a friend. Only for someone whose life was actually in my hands, someone who trusted me so completely, that I knew so well, that I could make that call for him. I’ve never had a friendship that close, and don’t expect I ever will.

That kind of relationship is family.

So, I guess that’s what Sammy is, what Charlie was. My family. My pack. My son.

My dog.

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