Responsible for Us

                      By R. Drib

Buddy walked the second mile

He felt it in his shins

For all he knew when he got home

He’d pay for all his sins

The dog would need to be let out

The cat too and her brood

And oh he hated doing time

To keep the pigeons cooed

But when he got there all was still

He wondered what was wrong

Had time stood still or run away

With all the four-foot kind

And was this now the heaven that

He’d waited on so long

Where not a feline or dog scat

In him would raise that nasty song

Of service and of feined love

For creatures here below

For all the fowl created first

So many eons ago

Pets are a nuisance. One can never pet animals enough. Petting is a sign of their authority over you. Give an animal an inch and he’ll take an ell. F--- them all, I say. I am a man with the following habits, as my behavior concerns animals. I dislike horses. I abhor all cats. I take strong exception to the purchase and feeding of birds. I loathe snakes and their legless keep. Rabbits do not disquiet me, but irritate the hell out of me. I dispise the man in power at the upper level academy where I teach who sends around a memo asking faculty to please mind their speech and keep it proper. Cows less so, of all the four-footed kind, but even with them I avoid contact.

       I will give you a for instance. If ever I have to go to a farm and if then I am shown about it by the owner who, of course, takes pride in the few hens, sheep, goats and cows he nurses about the place, I insist that he watch me squat at the gutter in the barn and defecate. He usually looks hard at me for a minute altogether without speaking. Then I explain that cows regularly lift tail and crap wherever they may be and are not reprimanded. He will turn from Bossy or Browny then, without introducing her to me, and will lead me back outdoors to the tolerably natural part of the yard where we may breathe fresh air and tread on green grass rather than manure.

       Hens--and especially the little chicks--leave me cold and inconsiderate. I am not a vegetarian. I love to eat animals, if you were beginning to suspect my politics. I once witnessed a Clydesdale step on a chanticleer and felt elation. The fowl did not die but lay there horribly injured, to my great satisfaction. Swift tolerated nincompoops no more willingly than I tolerate all forms of animal life. I feel, at times, mornings especially, like disfiguring a puppy, or a cat. I would never do so, for legal reasons, and since I hold a public position of high rank. Yet, just once, for the sheer release of the thing, hand me a chicken as I lay there in that half hour between sleep and waking and I would venture to guess that I would not be able to stop myself. Wild life more than all other forms arouses my ire. Wolves make the world a less safe place, let alone a hygienic one. They move about the countryside indiscriminately dropping their turds on gorse and shrub, under tree and hedge. I stretch out in the grass and lay down in them! Plus, the females eat their little ones’ droppings. I have seen a mother dog gobble up—it is too much for memory—three pups worth of morning toast, wet, steaming, sickening. And this is called creation, and those creatures?

Ibises I cannot abide. They, with their long necks straining skyward one moment and ducked down beneath the mucky water the next searching out dead crab and mortified clam, give me the heebeegeebies. If I had one in my hands now, I swear I would tear it apart limb from limb. Even rare species, such as the Trumpeter Swan, activate my spleen. I seldom attend dinner parties, private or departmental, to which my wife and myself have received invitation. The Two-tufted Fishmonger that inhabits the northern lakes of Quebec strikes me as a truly offensive fowl. It snacks on beetles in the mud, dead or alive, it nibbles at things crawling in mounds of moose droppings, it defecates itself nine times an hour, and it closes its eyes so smugly on television programs devoted to it. I would like to smack those self-satisfied peepers once or twice to show it what for, and to wake it up to its fortunes.

Bears in the wild have no reason to consider themselves deserving. Give me license and I would, if I had the desire to mount such an expedition, turn my last remaining ten years to a decline in their population. What on earth do we need them for in our forests? They thrive on human waste and refuse. Knee-deep in discarded diapers, they congregate and gambol in garbage dumps, mindless of the fuss they generate in the hearts of those hired to bring human excess away from human sight. Deer, too, and especially, cause me concern for my heart. If I see one more movie about a young girl attached to a baby deer received with a broken limb on her farm, delivered by well-meaning conservation officers!

Domestic pets in my view are an abomination and should be gotten rid of. They stink, they fritter away their time, they cause the old to fall and injure themselves, they rub their anuses on blankets of babies and the babies put these filthy coverlets to and into their mouths, they whine and call when put outdoors if it is the least bit cold, and in every way insist that they be pampered. Pamper them by putting them all out in the snow on a fifty-below night for its duration, I say, and rid us of the troubles they bring. I am myself retiring in two years and by that time will have freed this house of the cat my children gave us for Christmas once when they wished to be less responsible for us.