To our 4-footed companions

It should be no surprise to anyone that I share my life and home with an assortment of wee beasties, a veritable horde of cats and dogs.  For a long time my wife and I worked with Seattle Purebreed Dog Rescue, though the acquisition of our Jindo put an end to our ability to foster any others.  She is a jealous beast, and it is not within her to easily tolerate dogs in her territory that are not already part of her pack.

She’s my wife’s self-appointed guardian.  In the summer, when I’m at work, she stays outside on the porch with Shaiha while she sits reading in the cool night air, ever alert for any sign of danger.  She’s the foster-mother of our youngest kitten, the gorgeous black longhair named Deja, and spends as much time as she can grooming him.  He seems to enjoy that as much as he loves being petted by his human slaves.

Beijing is the largest of our canine companions, fifty-five pounds of muscular agility.  She was a rescue, and still suffers from a lack of trust towards men and anyone wearing a uniform.  Even now, after some years in our home, she flinches if I move towards her carrying anything at all.  I would so like to repay the person who put that fear into her, though I’m sure it would do no good in the end.  Any person who would abuse a dog, particularly a loving creature like ‘Jing, is probably beyond redemption.

Our oldest dog is my Shiba Ina, Kitsune.  Both lazy and cunning, Kits is a sneaky, conniving creature with a primitive breed’s sense of self-interest.  Oh, he’s obedient enough as such things go, but you can always see him thinking to himself “so what’s in it for me?“  This is the dog who will appear to be sleeping in the corner until I step out for a smoke, then pop up and go for my coffee sitting on the arm of my chair, who suffers not the slightest feelings of guilt or contrition even when caught in the act.  This is a dog who plans things out, and shows no sign of having done so until he’s already in action.  He’s the reason we make sure to keep medicine bottles out of reach of the dogs, because he’s proven more than once that he can open them without biting off the lid.  He holds them between his feet and turns the childproof cap with his teeth until it pops open.

Then there’s our Pomeranian Devil, Captain Fuzzybutt.  Oh, his official name is Creme-De-Kharma, but he likes his nickname.  Even when he’s in full “I’m going to eat the neighbor” barking his fool head off mode, he’ll almost always answer to his nickname.  He understands English better than any other dog I’ve ever seen.  One must be very careful what one says around him, because he’ll respond to things you would swear he couldn’t possibly understand.  And loyal to a fault.  This dog is firmly convinced that every other human–other than those officially part of his pack–are out to get us and he’s willing to throw his 25 pounds into the breech to hold them off until we can either escape or deal with them ourselves.

The funny thing is my wife wanted a lap dog.  That’s why we got Kharma in the first place.  We didn’t expect a mutant Pom.  He’s the farthest thing from a lap dog you can imagine.  Unfailingly loyal to us, but too damn supercharged to sit on any lap for any length of time.

So that’s why we got Bella-Boo, my wife’s Minature Pincer.  Bella’s whole purpose in life is to snuggle, preferably with my wife.  Her most relevant command is “Be flat,” which my wife uses to prompt her to lay still beneath her laptop while she sits in her chair and does her business.  Bella’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, and is far more likely to look to us for protection than otherwise, but she’s my wife’s dog body and soul.

Then, of course, there’s the cats.  Damien, who came to my wife on Halloween the year before me met, and who tried to brain me with a houseplant after I’d moved in, who still for some reason acts as though he expects me to enact my vengeance on him nearly eight years later.  He’s a well-mannered old gentleman cat now, but he tolerates me as a necessary evil who can be trusted to give good scritches when the opportunity arises.

My wife’s never satisfied with only one cat.  Deciding she wanted a companion for her Bella, she contacted a friend who’d taken in a pregnant stray and claimed one of the kittens.  Oddly enough, though Shaiha is a natural “cat-whisperer,” it wasn’t her to whom the kitten bonded.  Mere moments after meeting him, Bastion made it clear that he was my cat, whether I wanted a cat or not.  Bastion is an odd beast himself and I think if I were a witch, he’d be my familiar.  He’s nearly as obedient as any dog (probably more so than my Shiba) and nearly always comes when I call him.  He’s one of the only male cats I’ve known who likes having his belly rubbed, and acts as though he knows exactly what we’re saying to him.

Deja, the kitten we brought in when it became clear that Bastion and Bella weren’t going to bond, is a reddish-black longhair, truly one of the most beautiful cats I’ve ever known.  And an absolute lush.  He likes being petted so much, he’s quite contented when Beijing grooms him, and will actually seek her out when he wants attention he can’t get from a human.  When he saw us feeding mice to our snake (we also have a ball python) I told him that if he wanted mice, he’d have to catch them himself.  Two days later he caught a mouse in the house and is now receiving bounties of cat treats for every mouse he catches.  He even conscripted Bastion into helping him a time or two.  Unfortunately, I think the two did their job too well for their sakes, for I’m not sure there are any mice left.  Fine by me.  We live in an old house and the mice seemed entirely too comfortable here.  Deja and Bastion took care of that.

There are people in the world who think that pets are just bundles of programmed responses, that animals can’t “think” as we recognize it.  All I know is that no two animals with which I’ve shared my life have been like one another.  No dog, regardless of breed, is like another, and no cat has been a mere doppelganger of one that came before it.

Now is a rough time for people, and likewise for pets.  When people lose their homes, all too often their animals end up in shelters, abandoned and condemned to an early death.  When we take an animal into our homes, we are accepting responsibility for them, we are making a promise to them that we are honor-bound to keep.  They trust us, they love us, and they guard us from interlopers, be they human or rodent.  They ask little in return.

So here’s to our 4 footed companions, whatever they may be.  The world would be a much poorer place if they weren’t in it, and our lives so much less worth living.