Pets, And a PSA: Please Vote

“Or loving something that you’re almost guaranteed to outlive”

Before I get into the heart of this hopefully short piece, I want to say that I really hope you voted. Or, if you’re reading this the day of, that you will vote, because there’s still time! The polls don’t close until tonight (that is, the 3rd of November 2020), and you can even register to vote at your polling place! Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to wait a long time to vote since I imagine the lines might be lengthy, but it’s worth it! Regardless of who you’re voting for, if you only vote in one election, make it this one. It’s not just your right to vote; it’s your obligation to vote. To make yourself heard and be an active member of the civic community. If not, why even bother living in a democracy? Well, I mean, I guess your vote doesn’t really count, though, so…

Like I said last time, I have very strong opinions about who should be the next president of the United States, and a large number of people will disagree with me. But I hope that one thing we can all agree on is that the electoral college is awful and needs to disappear. Regardless of how this election turns out, the electoral college is a feature of the past when the founding fathers believed that the people weren’t actually smart enough to be trusted with a vote, so they gave the power to handful of prestigious yet shadowy representatives. How do they get picked? Where do they come from? Hell if I know, and that’s kind of my point! As a couple of elections have shown now, the popular vote doesn’t actually make a difference in the face of the bullshit that is the electoral college. Not all votes are equal, because ultimately the presidency is decided by some other group that isn’t the majority of the United States. If we really want to know who Americans want to be president, then everyone should vote, and the winner should be picked by simple majority. There’s no doubt about it then; the majority of the country wanted one candidate or another. No swing states, no electoral votes, no nonsense about less populated states have stronger votes.

I still think you should vote, since there are other races on that ballot, and those aren’t determined by the electoral college (as far as I know, anyway), so your say matters more in those. So vote! I did, and I hope you will, too. Whatever happens today and in the next coming weeks, I hope for peace and safety for the country and everyone in it, I hope for a country that can be unified and not divided, and I hope for justice and rights to the minorities and oppressed peoples who are constantly at threat of physical violence, economic harm, or political manipulation. I’m voting for who I hope will bring the most good to the most number of people, and I hope that you are, too. So please vote.

In other news, since I want to get away from the madness that is the American political machine, let me tell you about my fish that died a couple of days ago. His name was Gerald, nicknamed Gerry, Geralt, Jerr Bear, and Jareth. He was one of those weird glofish, the genetically-modified fish that produce fluorescent materials in their bodies and glow under UV light. Honestly, the notion of that makes me a little bit uncomfortable for reasons that I can’t entirely put into the words. I think it has something to do with manipulating a semi-sentient being for the sheer purpose of human amusement, but that isn’t much different from a lot of other things people do to animals. But anyway, my girlfriend, Cheyenne, and I got Gerry at a PetSmart a month or so into quarantine, because we felt like we needed a pet. He was the smallest betta fish I’d ever seen, and also the only betta fish in the PetSmart, so we didn’t have much of a choice. But we just felt so bad for him being there alone that we got him.

We only had him for about six months before he just sort of… died. We don’t know why. He just stopped moving one day. I’m afraid that I overfed him, because fish are stupid and will eat until they literally explode, but I also wonder if those glofish are genetically modified to have shorter lifespans so that you have to buy more of them. Like a planned obsolescence sort of thing. But that’s just my theory, because we had the filter, we had the heater, we changed the water and everything. We fed him regularly. So I don’t know why he died. But, I guess what’s worse in some ways, is that I don’t know why I feel so bad about it.

I got stupidly attached to this tiny fish. We buried him beneath the tree in front of our house, in a little box and with some photograph time capsules. We had a whole little funeral for him, and it was honestly surreal. Why the hell did I care? Why did this bother me so much? Was it the lack of closure? Was it the fact that I’d been attached to this fish and I was sad that it was gone? Was it that any sort of death is generally sad and tends to make you consider your own mortality? It was probably a combination of all of these, and one of the pains that comes with loving animals. Or loving anything, really; there’s a good chance that you will outlive it, and you’ll have to go on without them. And it’s your choice.

I’ve been really, really lucky when it comes to death in that I haven’t been particularly exposed to it. I’ve lost family, of course, and because of it, Gerry’s death isn’t even close to the most meaningful in my life. That, of course, goes to my grandfather, great-uncle, and great-grandparents. But I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have had them all for so long, and that these deaths mostly came later in my life. I’ve never had to deal with the wrenching loss of a parent or sibling or even someone my age. So my experience with the end of life is limited to the elderly, even when it’s unexpected, and to pets. That’s why, maybe, the most meaningful non-human death I experience was that of my orange-winged Amazon parrot, Cleo.

My parents, brother, and I received Cleo unexpectedly from a friend of my mom’s, who couldn’t take care of her anymore. We actually already had birds when we had Cleo, a couple of cockatiels and parakeets, and we’d had birds previously. Of course, that, too, was a strange experience with death; we only had our first cockatiel for a month before it was brutally murdered in our own home when a feral cat clawed in through our window and ripped his wing off. I’m going to do a post on it eventually, but I’ll tell you my most controversial opinion right now: if you let your cat outside, unattended, for hours on end to roam the wild, you are a bad cat owner and an even worse environmentalist. I’m sorry, but this is one of those things that I refuse to compromise on. But, anyway, that bird’s name was Harry, and we only had him a few months before he was killed. As anyone who has a pet knows, it’s a strange experience to willingly choose to bring this non-human entity into your life, love it as if it were a person, and then watch it die. The buffer that divides that fraught emotional turmoil from being something much worse is the fact that the creature isn’t human, I’m sure. But the choice is still your own, and that’s what makes it so weird.

It was that way with our dogs, too. We used to have two dogs, Droopy and Jake, who died (of old age, thankfully) just before we determined that I was allergic to dogs. Jake was a German shepherd mix, not very smart but a good dog. Droopy was a frothing lunatic of a pitbull mix that my parents adopted from the shelter only to discover that she had been trained by her previous owner to bark at our neighbors. Especially, my dad says, the crossing guard. But somehow, Droopy was great with children, which is to say she was great with me and my brother, Nick, and she tolerated Jake. She tried to eviscerate every other dog she came in contact with. But even so, we loved them, too. After we moved, Droopy would roll around in the mulberries that fell in our yard and turn purple. Jake would go on walks with my mom and stare stupidly at deer that jumped past them. They were good dogs.

We also had a cat, for a while, that, not unlike our bird Harry, faced a similarly tragic end in that, while taking the cat to our grandfather’s house for babysitting one week, our cat was bit by our cousin’s dog. The dog was just trying to play, but clamped down too hard and punctured the cat’s lung, killing it slowly. I was only a few years old, then, and barely remember it. But having pets die in unexpected or gruesome ways is not a fun experience. And yet I still want to get more pets, because there’s something about animal companionship that is deeply meaningful.

We had more birds after Harry. A couple of parakeets that I got for my birthday, Stan and Ollie. They weren’t very friendly, as they bonded to each other, but, being a child, I didn’t know how to properly care for them from a social perspective, anyway, so they just kind of existed with us. Some cockatiels we got from my grandfather, Pearl and Ruby, were pretty sweet. Pearl liked to cuddle, but Ruby got kind of jealous of the human attention we gave Pearl, so he’d get snippy at times. And then there was Woody, who was an old curmudgeon of a bird who did his absolute best to ignore us at all times. All of our birds died prematurely and rather suddenly. This included Cleo.

Even though Cleo was our last bird, she was my favorite. She became the most social out of all of our birds, calling me over to pet her and scratch at the casings on her feathers. She imitated the fire alarm when she was angry or excited, and would fling water from her water bowl anytime my mom cleaned the house. Whatever trauma she had suffered previously, because she was around middle-aged when we got her, caused her to distrust human hands. My mom’s friend who had her before us had got her from her vet, who in turn had found her shivering in a pile of leaves. So Cleo eventually came to us, and we did the best we could to take care of her. We gave her cheese and eggs, made little salads for her, and tried to get her to talk. Initially, she hated all of us, and was afraid of everything, but she came to have a special bond between my mom and I, and she would scream in excitement when we got home from work or school. But she never wanted to leave her cage.

So I guess I should have realized that something was wrong the day she finally let me pick her up. She was shaky, she was scared, and she was very weak. I got home from school, and within an hour, with a last terrified spurt of motion, she was dead. I still don’t know what happened to her, though I have my suspicions. One day she was fine, the next she was gone. Birds are very sensitive to chemicals, so there are tons of different possible causes. But whatever it was, we were powerless to stop it. And she died in my lap. Since I wasn’t able to be in town when my grandfather passed, that’s still the physically closest I’ve been to death.

Having really, really close pets is such a strange choice to make because, with some exceptions, they will die first. We buy or adopt or rescue these animals that wouldn’t survive on their own, have been bred or raised for the explicit purpose of keeping us company. Of adding meaning and value to our lives. They live to serve us, and we choose to serve them. Besides having children, or caring for a disabled or elderly family member, pets should be the heaviest personal responsibility someone takes on, if you ask me. Because they’re living things. And even if our purpose for getting pets is as self-centered as it might be geared towards adoption or rescue, we still owe them something. To offer them anything less than the best life you can give them is a betrayal of their trust. In fact, to offer anything that you take into your care, pet or human, less than the best you can give is a betrayal. Maybe we get pets to make us feel better, or because we think we need to. But they aren’t a toy or a status symbol. They’re alive. And when they’re gone, they should leave a gap in your heart.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make here is that pets are a pleasure and a pain that we choose. While losing a pet, any pet, ultimately pales in comparison to the loss of a close human family member, I don’t think you’ve cared for your pet properly if you don’t mourn their loss in some way. It’s strange, isn’t it, how people can get so attached to other living things? it’s really beautiful, though. We aren’t so different from animals after all.

So Cheyenne and I buried Gerry, and gave him a proper box and a time capsule. I dug a hole in the ground and place him there, as I had done for Cleo before him. As for Stan and Ollie and Harry and Woody and Pearl and Ruby and Gammy (our turtle) and Brownie (our guinea pig) and two nameless lizards and some guppies. And yet, Cheyenne and I got a new fish, and named him Murphy. He’s very pretty, and we’re going to be really careful not to overfeed him, if that was the problem. And I know that, one day, I will get another parrot. When I’m ready to give it the attention it needs (since caring for parrots is almost like caring for a toddler), I will get another bird, and for a while, it will remind me of Cleo. And that’s ok. Because we carry the dead with us, at all times. Some of them have more weight than others. But at the end of the day, we carry them all. And someday, they’ll carry us, too.