View from the North 40: Four-legged family is still family

According to current popular standards, I should be referring to my animals as “fur-babies,” but we don’t share that kind of relationship.

My critters aren’t my children and I’m not their mother. I think I would remembered having a puppy in a birthing room 15 years ago. I’m equally certain everyone else would remember that, too. Surely a photo would still be circling the internet of things showing a fuzzy newborn puppy, already sporting a full beard and old-man eyebrows, lying swaddled in blue in a baby observation nursery.

These days it would be a meme with the caption, “This fur-baby’s mommy said he was too ugly to love. Share this message if you think he’s beautiful and deserves a better family.”

The meme for the cat-child would just be: “Dog-woman has baby. Who was she cattin’ around with this time!?!”

If I thought of my dog as my baby, would I feed him the same thing every day for the last 13 years? If he thought of himself as my child, don’t you think he’d demand a bit better treatment? Look how good I eat.

Sure, there are non-food-adventurers out there. One time my cousin brought her pre-first-grade kids for a visit, and all they would eat was plain hamburgers, hot dogs and a specific brand of frozen burrito. No spaghetti — what kind of kids don’t eat pasta? The kind of kids going through a phase. They aren’t in danger of eating the same thing for the rest of their lives. I’ve seen the food photos.

As for the cat, we cater to his meows to go out and come back in all the time – 24/7. And, yes, this is the kind of behavior an over-indulgent parent would display. On the other hand, when I need a full night’s sleep, I lock him in the shop that’s about 50 yards away from my bedroom. I leave him food, water, litter box, bed and thousands of cubic feet to explore. He can meow to his heart’s content and I can sleep a whole night through.

Can you imagine doing that with a human baby? “Hey, sweetie, here’s a bottle and a fresh diaper, see ya in the morning!”

I’m no parenting expert, but I’m reasonably sure that’s not how it’s done.

So the other morning, I was trying to work, and the pair of them were working their “I want in, no out” comedy routine. When I let them in “for the last time,” I pulled a suspicious downy feather off the cat, but I was I was too busy to pay attention to much else, like what the dog was doing.

It was about 1 ½ hours later that I walked into the living room and realized the body of a Eurasian collared dove was flopped onto the dog’s bed.

I’m no professional sleuth, but I think I found the source of the stray feather – it looked like something the cat killed and the dog dragged in.

Then it twitched.

At this point, I had to make a quick reassessment of the cat’s hunting ethics and the dog’s valuation of his own possessions to acknowledge that the cat had, in fact, only mortally wounded the bird, and the dog had, in turn, brought said bird into the house to let it finish dying in red on the bed I bought him a mere month ago.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gah! I just do not feel like having to euthanize that not-quite-dead bird in my living room today.” No? Hmmm. Me neither. Until Tuesday, that is.

By the time I returned from Dumpster Cemetery, I had decided that it’s a good thing they aren’t my children. If they were my kids, I would be thinking I had raised a pair of serial killers and maybe I should be fearing for my life.

Instead, I got to walk into the house, pointing a finger at the four-legged freeloaders, and tell them that this is my den, my domain, and they would follow my rules. In fact, I chewed them out the whole time I was cleaning the dog’s bed.

As a display of respect for my station as the human in charge, the cat started cleaning himself and the dog inspected the new clean spot on his bed before flopping down and falling asleep.

It wasn’t until well after midnight that I remembered that Tuesday was the dog’s 15th birthday, and I hadn’t even sung the birthday song to him. I was just grateful then that the cat had gotten him a present.

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It was a quiet but respectful funeral, followed by a guilt party for one at [email protected] .