Evening all,
I was offered a cat at work today. This got me thinking about the animals I have loved and lost in my life.
The first pet I ever owned was a hamster, and being the deep, insightful person I am, I gave naming him some really serious thought before calling him 'Hammy'. To be fair, my imagination may have been a little off as Hammy had kept me awake for most of the night after Santa Claus had put him and his cage in my bedroom.
Hamsters are officially the most boring pet a kid ,who has to go to bed at 7pm, can get. Hamsters like to sleep from 6am to 10pm and then they like to party, hamster style. When I say party...I mean make as much irritating noise as they can, because they would sooner be out in the wild scrapping for food, than have it hand fed to them in a cage no bigger than a portable telly.
Maybe this was the reason Hammy took any opportunity to sharpen his teeth on my eight year old fingers whenever i went near his cage. All I wanted was to love him, hug him, squeeze him and make his stay in my room the best a hamster could get. Hammy repaid me by biting me every day, stinking my room out with the smell of stale hamster urine and rattling his metal cage at full volume eight nights a week.
Hammy's teeth were his downfall though. During a particularly wild night he managed to open the food bag next to his cage and an avalanche of hamster grub fell in his cage. Unfortunately, it was 4 days until i noticed this by which time Hammy had eaten his own weight (and several other hamsters) in pet food.
I found Hammy at the end of the week stuck inside one of the circular connecting tubes (that let him go from compartment to compartment) in his cage, too big to get through. My mum managed to free him with an old toothbrush and some Fairy Liquid but sadly, mammy couldn't save Hammy as he was already dead.
We buried him at the bottom of the garden with a cassette player playing 'Walking on Sunshine' by KC and the Sunshine Band. Over the following years Hammy was joined by Claudine the chicken, Joey the budgie, Bizmarck the dacshund and 24 unnamed golden medika fish (who jumped out of their tank when the lid was left off and were then sucked up our hoover by Beryl the cleaner - we left them in the hoover bag for simpicity when they were buried) .
So, I said no thanks to the cat today. I've never been a big fan of cats...they seem a little dull to me. I like animals that have character or facial expressions...like frowning or smiling.....cats just have the same expression all day (and it's not a very interesting one)....give me a dog any day.
David
