Pets, Why?

Yesterday, around 4PM.

Rat Dog and I are sitting on the couch. She's folded in half, one hind leg reaching for the ceiling, and licking her privates like a liver-flavored lollypop.

"Could you get any more vulgar?" I ask.

She shoots me a look that says, "We can't all have two-ply Charmin," and gets back to work.

Outside, Nikster is drumming on his feeder. It's been raining all day and he's trapped under his porch. (Otherwise, like an equine Wicked Witch, he'd melt.) I don't give a rat's behind about the neighbors, but the racket is starting to annoy me. I put down my book, shove the Rat Dog aside, open the front door and yell, "Quit it." He stops and neighs equine obscenities at me.

I shut the door and sit down. Silence reigns, but not because he's behaving. Chance are good he's now chipping the stucco off the adobe wall. (This replaces the old habit of gnawing on his porch's support beams. Lest he bring the whole structure down on his big, empty head, all the wood is now wrapped in chicken wire.) Just about the time my ass has found the last viable chunk of stuffing in couch, he starts beating on the feeder again.

The Greyhound, meanwhile, wobbles out of the bedroom. He only moves a few times a day. Sadly, someday he will pass away and we won't notice until he misses a meal. After a drink of water, he pauses in the living room, head high, ears up. He epitomizes the magnificence of the breed, an image of an Anubis statue in a pharaoh's tomb. Then he shakes, sending drool flying. His spittle is the stuff of an Alien movie, caustic, it eats holes in furniture and leaves permanent streaks on the walls.

And his farts can take down a charging rhino. And he has the mind of a yam.

In the bedroom, the pleco (catfish) is digging up the plants and decorations in the aquarium and sending them gleefully to the water's surface. He does this every day.

I'm looking at my menagerie and wondering if any of them make good eating.