A dog’s life

I’m trying to write a column, but Aengus just wants to play. He doesn’t want to play alone, he wants his person. That would be me. Aengus is a dog.

Pets give our lives another dimension. We make them our friends, our life partners, even our confidants sometimes. We care for them the way people used to care for elderly relatives. In return, they provide joyful moments, uncomplicated devotion and a sense of noble purpose.

What’s more, they show us that humans don’t have a franchise on personality. Aengus has plenty of personality, but so do most pets, if you ask their owners.

We have had guinea pigs for over a decade now, ever since the director of our Montessori school offered us “Rocky,” an offspring of her own family’s thriving community of cavies. Rocky was so-named for his inimitable imitation of a rock—solid, inert, and black all over. Having little personality, we imbued him with much. He reminded me of the character that Peter Sellars played in the film “Being There,” whose silence was seen as wisdom.

When Rocky died, the children wrote “Rocky—We Loved You So Much” in permanent marker on his concrete gravestone. He had taught them, after all, the joy of welcoming another creature into your life, the persistence of care a pet (or child) requires, and the inevitability of loss. Just by imitating a rock. After Rocky, there were more than a dozen guinea pigs. The two we have now were bred from our own stock, but we have been known to acquire a stud or two from a local pet store. Pogo was a favorite pet store pig. His long white fur genes mixed well with Coco’s solid brown ones, producing Cupcake’s multicolor markings. Coco was my favorite pig. I identified with her maternal bearing, her devotion to her clan.

A Freudian might say I was projecting my own traits onto a guinea pig. Yeah, so what? I like the idea that humans aren’t the only creatures capable of selfless love. I think it bodes well for the world.

People with fish tanks will tell you one fish is a bully; the other one is tolerant. I like what that says about the natural world—that competing forces are at work all the time, bringing balance to a seemingly chaotic world.

Bill Streeter, who rescues and trains injured raptors through his Delaware Valley Raptor Center in Milford, PA, told a crowd of eagle fans last weekend that he “wants people to see these birds and come to love them, so they won’t want to harm them.” His concern is justified. At presentations like the one at EagleFest in Narrowsburg, he tells the awful tale of the slaughter of 35 bald eagles in one day by a lone man with a shotgun in Alaska.

Streeter believes that familiarizing people with the species up close may prevent such tragedies in the future. Says Streeter, “How can you see these birds and not care about what happens to them?”

I have met dozens of people on my walks with Aengus who tell me of their pet rescues. My friend Trina found her cat, Tiger Lily, abandoned in an airshaft behind a Manhattan apartment building. Malnourished and missing an eye, Tiger Lily was also suffering from feline AIDS. She has since been nursed back to relative health by her human friend.

Pet owners who are beneficent to animals are sometimes not so generous to their human brethren. The simple, necessary act of picking up after your dog seems beyond the ability of some masters. I notice they’re selling doggie diapers in the finer pooch emporiums now. I’d be embarrassed to dress my dog in one, but I have no such hesitation when it comes to dressing-up.

Aengus sports a homemade sweater with his name appliquéd in large red letters across the back. It’s a pattern designed by Tiger Lily’s owner, Trina, who retrieves discarded people-sweaters and re-fashions them into doggie styles. Her life with pets has given Trina a whole new creative outlet, as well as a budding career as a pet fashionista.

When I walk Aengus in the country now, he is pegged immediately as a “city dog,” owing to his elegant finery. He doesn’t seem to mind. Or am I just projecting?