The Weekend Assignment is posted each Friday at Outpost Mâvarin; a roundup of responses goes up the following Thursday, so if you’d like to join in, you’ve still got some time!

Weekend Assignment #205: As of 2007 Americans owned over 72 million dogs, and over 81 million cats. They also owned horses, birds, fish, turtles, ferrets, lizards and other critters. (Real statistics can be found here.) My question is this: what pets have you had, other than a dog or cat? Is there some kind of pet (allergies and zoning ordinances permitting) that you’d like to have?

Extra Credit: Are you more of a cat person, or more of a dog person, both or neither?

My pets were pretty conventional while I was growing up, but when First Husband, our son, and I moved into student family housing upon our arrival at Cornell, the apartments only permitted pets that could be contained or caged. When friends of ours movied into a larger off-campus place and bought a big saltwater aquarium, they offered us their old ten-gallon fishtank, and we took them up on it.

Neither of us had ever had fish before, but our friends gave us good advice and showed us how to take care of the tank. Fish don’t live very long, so over four years we went through an assortment of tetras, gouramis, the occasional algae-eater, and a few bettas (Siamese fighting fish, which are peaceful if you only have one at a time; they only fight with each other, not other fish). But when we moved to Memphis at the end of First Husband’s grad-school years, the tank didn’t come. Watching the fish swim around could be very relaxing sometimes, but they’re really not the most interactive or interesting pets, in my opinion.

We knew we eventually wanted a dog, but First Husband held pretty strongly to the principle that “dogs need yards,” and since we were still apartment dwellers for our first several years in Memphis, we had to wait. Therefore, our son’s first real pet was a hamster, which he named MC (“MC Hamster” – get it? Being the lame-pun fans that we are, we were quite pleased with the name, to be honest). MC was definitely Chris’ pet and not a “family” critter – his cage was in Chris’ room (where he was responsible for cleaning it; if you’ve never lived with a hamster, they’re a bit smelly), and I didn’t really do much with him, since I’m honestly not a big rodent fan. Hamsters don’t have particularly long lifespans either, and by the time MC was nearing the end of his, we had the house and the first of our two dogs, Shadow. (Gypsy came along later. Shadow’s my ex-dog now, still living in Memphis with First Husband.)

Shadow joined our family when he was barely six weeks old, and the experience of raising a puppy was similar enough to that of living with a growing baby (a very quickly growing baby, anyway) that it confirmed my intention not to have any more children. There’s one thing that’s very different about bringing up a dog or cat, though; I still recall, on the day that Shadow turned six months old, calling the vet to schedule the appointment for him to get “tutored” (as First Husband calls it, after a Far Side cartoon). Not something you’d do with a child of an equivalent age.

Gypsy, the dog who’s not my “ex,” came to us through a rescue/foster adoption, and spaying or neutering is usually a prerequisite for those arrangements. She ended up needing a family because she had been abandoned while pregnant with a litter of puppies; her “rescuer” took care of her and found homes for all the pups, but no takers for their mother, and thus a subsequently-spayed Gypsy came to the “adoption day” at PetStar, where she found me. Her story is an illustration of why spaying and neutering are necessary.

Part of being a responsible pet “parent” is ensuring that you don’t become a pet “grandparent.” And it’s now the law in the city of Los Angeles; with a few specific exceptions, all dogs and cats must be spayed or neutered by the time they’re four months old. (If I’d known it could be done that early, Shadow wouldn’t have made it to six months before having his procedure, but that’s the age our vet told us at the time.) It’s one of those laws that’s going to be tough to enforce, but it’s one of those things that shouldn’t have to be a law, either. The new law makes certain allowances where breeding will be permitted, but they’re probably not applicable to the majority of pet owners, so in the words of Bob Barker, “Please, spay or neuter your pets.”

So now that I’m off the soapbox, the short answer to the extra-credit question is definitely “dog person.” A dog convert, really, since I grew up with cats. If I couldn’t have a dog, though, I’d probably take a cat over any of those “other” pets. I like my pets furry and interactive.

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