Pets Vs. Me Yaheng Chen   © Copyright 2018 by Yaheng Chen

I think my pets hates me for something. They just don’t like me. I mean, all of them got away from me for some reason.

See, over the course of my life, I have pets for about four times. First, all of them had a great time with me. But then, all of them caused or had some serious issues, and they either got sent away, just lost into the great unknown, or died.

Yes, died.

Well, I did not kill them, and these deaths involve very horrifying accidents, and I had nothing to do with it.

The story starts with my first two dogs:

I had known them ever since the I started to remember things. But I was so young that I cannot remember their names, so let’s just call them by their skin color.

I had been very close to my dogs, I helped my parents bathed and fed them, and in return, they play with me every day. We had fun. I would hug them, run with them, and ride them(though they don’t seem to like it very much).

But, one day, when I was 5 years old, I am introduced to the concept of kissing after I watched two people kissing on TV. Well, as a dumb 5 year old, I was intrigued. I am curious of the feeling of kissing something. So, I had the stupidest idea ever.

Since my parents kept telling me that I was way too young to know these stuff, I had to get the answer myself. One day, when my parents are out, I “kissed” the dog on the nose. Yes, I “kissed” them on the nose on the nose. (see what I did there).

Black and Yellow take turns to be “kissed”, until I was fed up with it and started to do something new. On that day, I was able to understand parts of the definition of kissing.

Yet, I suddenly had trouble breathing the next day. It took awhile for my parents to understand, but I was sent to the hospital emergency care. The reason of my troubled breathing: a dog fur in my trachea. The dog fur caused enough irritation in there that it would have killed me if not treated early.

Seven days later, I come home from the hospital and realized that Yellow and Black were nowhere to be seen. It would be 10 years later that I found out the truth that they were sent away because my parents worried that the same thing would happen to me again.

Though I don’t feel bad about it after I realized the truth about their disappearance, I do feel kind of grateful that they did not find out about the kissing dog story. It would be a family joke for years if they finds out.

Five years or so after Yellow and Black, we got our first cat:

We realized that our house is got a very bad rodent issue. I mean, these vermins are everywhere. And they chew and destroy everything. Therefore, to solve the problem the cheap and easy way, my parents adopted a cat. We never had a name for him, so we just call him Cat.

When we got Cat, he was defiant. He didn’t like the new surroundings. The new people. The new leash.

We have to chain him up for a few days, or he’ll run lost into the neighborhood.

Cat was able to calm down after a few days of not eating and biting on the leash, but he still would not trust us. Animals.

So we decided to walk him around in the house with a leash, showing him where to go and where not to, and also what he is employed to do.

“You are authorized in the garden, but DO NOT jump into the fish pond, they’re not your food.”

Meow.

“And you are restricted from the interior of the house, since you are a cat.”

Meow?

“And, if you really want a snack so bad, we had plenty of rodents around here, so eat as much as you can with all your spare time.”

Meow.

After the job orientation, Cat was relieved a bit, so we decided to release him the next day and let him explore.

On that day, he caught his first rat.

Seeing him devour the rodent is a sight too bloody to watch, but also too satisfying not to watch. And we know that our rodent issue will be gone with Cat patrolling around. Which also means that we can save money on rat poisons.

OH YEAH!

Soon, Cat began to expand his patrolling ground deeper into the neighborhood. He would return home with a dead mice in our front door, and another one that he is devouring. At that moment, everything was perfect.

And that moment ended.

Over the course of Cat’s reign, there are no sight of any rats in the neighborhood. Every night he goes, he brings something back. But one day, he failed to come back. And he never did. He must have gone too deep into the neighborhood, or out of it. Whatever the case, he is gone.

Now that our precious ranger was gone, we have to find another replacement for him. So we adopted 2 cats: they sucked.

They don’t do anything besides eating our food for free, so we decided to send them off and find a new cat.

Two months after we sent off those the two useless cats, we bought another cat from a pet marketplace.

When we saw him in the marketplace, we knew that this is the right cat. We knew that he will be a great ranger. And he feels the same thing towards us. As soon as we paid, he jumped out of the bag and into my mom’s lap.

He did not need a leash of restriction, he held on to us voluntarily. We chained him up in our house for a day to get him to relax, and cleaned him up after we applied the chain.

When we unchain him, he immediately goes to work. He caught his first mice that night and two the next. And very soon, he is out conquering the neighborhood.

Because of his outstanding mice catching records, we decided to name him Big Boss.

At day, Big Boss plays with us like any pet would, we climbed and ran and just walking out in the neighborhood. But at night, he is a hunter who lurks in the shadows, mercilessly murdering and devouring any rat who happens to enter his sight.

Sometimes, Big Boss would bring a half-dead rodent back to the house and perform some circus tricks for us. He would toss the rat high up in the air over and over again until it is dead. Or, if the rat refused to die, Big Boss would rip its head off. LITERALLY.

Unlike other pets that we had, Big Boss feels more like a person than a pet. One time, he become extremely sick. We thought that we are just going to lose him, and was getting ready to do a funeral for him.

The next day, Big Boss was nowhere to be found in the house. We searched and searched and we could not find him. When we found him, he was under our car, curled up in a ball, and tries to tell us to go away.

We were able to nurse him back to health sometime after that. But this incident allowed us to see clearly that Big Boss is not just our cat, our recruit, but a part of our family.

Yet, the perfect moment did not last forever.

In August, while we were discussing about our moving house trip, we ran into a problem. Since we were moving into another city, we have to take a plane, which means that we have to find a way to get Big Boss to move with us. We were never able to bring up any good ideas.

But we never have to.

A few days before our travel, while we were nervously coming up with a plan, Big Boss was out hunting. The next morning, he lay on the ground, gasping for air, struggling to even lift his head.

There is a dead rat laying next to him, a part of its body was ripped off.

We buried Big Boss soon after he departure, and wished him luck.

And we never have any pets after Big Boss. One is because our new neighborhood doesn’t allow it, but most importantly, is because we cannot endure any more tragedies like this.