Dream Journal: March 27, 2011

I had this dream a couple weeks ago:

I was walking in a mid-size town waterfront area — the sort with boat slips and local shops, but also parking lots for a moderate amount of tourist activity — with either my mother or my ex-boyfriend.  We stopped by a green van, where an old Asian woman gave us a styrofoam ice chest.

Inside the ice chest were four or five puppies, each the size of a small loaf of bread.  They were asleep, and young enough that their eyes were barely able to be open.  We were told that they were Bhutanese Yak Hounds, and I was shown a picture of an adult one, which looked like a single-color St. Bernard with an Akita’s tail.

As we walked back to the car, me carrying the ice chest, my mother or my ex-boyfriend (I guess it wasn’t important which one) walked ahead, leaving me behind.  The ice chest started to get heavier, and puppies apparently woke up and started moving around.  Peeking in the ice chest, I saw that the puppies were larger than before.

As the dream continued, the puppies kept getting larger until they started to climb out of the ice chest and on my shoulders and head.  I tried to call out for my mother or ex-boyfriend to wait for me, but either I couldn’t or she/he couldn’t hear me.  Soon I had five puppies, each about the size of the original ice chest, clambering all over me as I stumbled along, trying to get to our parked car.

Most likely, I was tangled in the sheets and my head had slipped off and under the pillow as I slept.

There is no such thing as a “Bhutanese Yak Hound”, although the Bhutia Sheepdog, related to the Tibetan Mastiff, might fit the bill.
 

Do Your Religion and Politics Extend to Your Pets?

Coming into work today, I was following a bus with an ad from the Humane Society (or maybe the SPCA) featuring a cat nursing a scad of kittens, labelled “Spay Me”, with a subtitle saying that family planning isn’t just for humans.

(It was totally LOLCat-able.  Photoshop the mama cat’s eyes a little bigger and add a word balloon saying “Please.  And soon.”)

It reminded me of a thought that came up a few weeks ago:

Do pro-lifers spay and neuter?

Spaying and neutering pets has long been a standard concept put forward by animal and pet groups.  I don’t think I have ever heard anyone take a stance against it, making it one of the (in theory) most non-controversial pieces of social messaging out there.

(I despise using the term “fixed”, though.  The pets are not broken.  You can argue that it is “fixed” as in “stabilized”, but few people think of that definition first.  It’s like using “catholic” when you mean “broad” or “universal”: everyone will have to work past the religious meaning to get at what you really mean, so why make them work that hard?  Unless you’re writing poetry, of course; you’re supposed to make people work hard to figure out what the fuck you really mean with poetry.  [Kidding.]  [No, I’m not.])

But with pro-life/anti-abortion people, though: for the extreme among them, any mention of “family planning” seems to inflame them.  And what is spaying/neutering, really, but abortion in advance?

I don’t know.  There is undoubtedly a theological difference between a fetus (post-conception) and an egg and sperm which don’t get together, but what about when it is the work of man keeping them from getting together?  The political philosophy is generally opposed to condoms and other birth control methods as well, under the belief that man blocking God’s will is wrong.  So following that logic, forced sterilization of a human — preventing the possibility of conception — should also be wrong.  (Presumably there are levels of wrong: abortion is worse than birth control, which I guess should be about parallel to sterilization, so long as you ignore the invasive/permanentness of it.)

(Hmm: is getting a vasectomy a sin?)

So back to the pets: if you’re opposed to birth control and to forced sterilization in humans, does that religio-political philosophy extend to your pets?  Should you be opposed to spay and neuter services because they are a form of birth control?  Or are they somehow okay because pets are dumb animals/lower lifeforms/unable to control themselves/creatures with no souls/whatever?

Talking about this with a co-worker, he did say he knew a pro-life couple who doesn’t spay/neuter their pets, so apparently some people follow this through at all levels, but they apparently keep pretty quiet about it.  (It’s hard to imagine people out picketing the Humane Society in opposition to spay/neuter services, isn’t it?)

Of course, we can flip this whole thing around from the right end of the spectrum to the left end: cats and dogs are carnivores, or carni-omnivores at best.  If you’ve decided to be vegetarian or vegan, do you require that of/force that on your pet as well?  (Myself, I can’t imagine a cat being happy with tofu and brown rice with a side of stewed lentils, instead of tuna.)
 

Pets

“There can be no greater reward in life than to come back as a gay man’s pet.”

(author: Peggy Drew — my mother)
 

Dream Journal: May 24, 2010

First, some background.  One of my cats has some toy mice, which she loves to fling in the air and a few feet across the room.  Inevitably, she ends up letting one “get away” under a piece of furniture where she can’t reach it; three of the six are currently AWOL that way, not even under their usual pieces of furniture.

In the dream, I found a small pile of mouse turds.  Opening the cabinet door under the sink, I found three mice (maybe these are the missing toys?), which started to squeak and scramble away.  I swept two of them out onto the floor, but the third got away.

The cat scrambled in and caught one by the tail, and flung it in the air and across the room.  But not the little flings she does in real life; here, the mouse sailed a good 8 or 10 feet and smacked hard into the wall about 5 feet up, then dropped to the floor, dazed.  She picked it up and flung it again, with similar effect.  It then did a drunken (concussed!) scramble for a hole under another cabinet and got away.

Dream Journal: November 1, 2009

I rarely have any dreams, or at least only rarely have any that I remember past waking up.  (I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about flying, although they say such are one the most common kinds.)  So when I do have a memorable one, I try to preserve it.

It was early evening and we were standing on the deck.  (There was a definite sense of “us”, but whether the other person was my real-world boyfriend or not, I can’t say.)  Down below, our cats (not my current cats, though) were leaping off the ground, landing in the top branches of trees, and then jumping down again — and not just jumping up and down, but 10 foot leaps into the air, into delicate twig-like branches, and doing backflips on the way down.  I soon realized that the trees were loaded with twittering birds, so the cats were jumping and catching them.

Looking closer at the branches nearest me, some of which extended onto the deck at foot level, I could see that the branches were laden with big plump berries or small plums, and the birds were feasting on them.  The berries were so ripe that they must have fermented and the birds were passing out after eating them.  There was even a stack of birds three deep in front of me.

Our dog (not my current dog, because I don’t have one) came over to the stack of birds, sniffed at them, and took the top one in its mouth, then dropped it over the edge of the deck.  The dog took the second one, and dropped it over the edge.  The dog then took the third one — a small, pure white bird which had been under the other two — took it in its mouth, and crunch crunch ate it.

And then I woke up.

I have no idea what the dream means.  (Do dreams always have to mean something?)  I can make up something sexual about watching other people doing fancy “tricks” and not settling for the first “bird” when a better one may be hidden behind it.  But the whole eating metaphor with the cats and dog gives that one a hard twist to the right.

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Updated on February 3, 2010
 

What Were They Thinking? — Meds for Cross-eyed and Possessed Pets

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

You probably saw these website ads for 1-800-PetMeds early this year: when the mouse passes over the ad, it turns into a bone or a fly, and the dog or cat’s eyes follow it.  Cute, huh?

At least until you move the cursor to extreme points — such as between the pet’s eyes — and the eye-tracking algorithm breaks, turning the pet into some hideous monstrosity, either a cross-eyed cat that probably can’t aim to find its litter box, or a possessed pug (ugly enough to start with).

(Maybe the dog is having visions of the future and is about to paint?  Or spray?  Or spray paint?   Where’s Mr. Muggles when we need him?)

Seriously, test your Flash ads before you deploy them.

 

Cat Scratch Fever

So there I am, lounging on the couch, watching Pearl Harbor — yeah, I know, that was my first mistake — when the 11-month old kitten zooms down the stairs, around the corner, bounces once on the carpet and leaps for the back of the couch. Only my face was in the way.

Damn good thing she’s so cute.

This is one time that the over-used movie line “That’s going to leave a mark” would have been appropriate.
 

Who’s the Leader of the Club?

Rusty’s teenage daughter, Sarah, lives with us, and along with her, we’ve got her albino corn snake, Dragon.  Every three weeks or so, we get Dragon three white mice for food.  Every couple months, Dragon sheds his skin, and during the days leading up to that, he is lethargic and moody and doesn’t want to eat, and his eyes cloud up.

Needless to say, sometimes “food” and “won’t eat” overlap.  Like this past week.

At first, we feared he was sick, because he didn’t eat the mice and wouldn’t even really pay attention to them.  But we finally realized that he was getting ready to shed his skin.  This left us with the question of what to do with the mice.

We could just let them starve to death, but I said this was even crueler than waiting for Dragon to eat them.  We could smother them and put them out of their misery, but that would be wasteful, as we would just have to get more mice in a few days.  The pet store wouldn’t take them back.  Rusty was worried that if they didn’t get eaten soon, they would make babies, and then we would have dozens of the things.  So we decided to leave them in Dragon’s tank, feed them, and wait.  They got to dine on lettuce, cheese, and Basic 4 breakfast cereal (which they really liked).

In the meantime, my cat, Dumaka, sat on the edge of the dresser — or even on top of the cage — and watched the mice.  You could just hear the gears turning in her little head: “Hey, if he won’t eat them, give them to me!  I know what to do with them!”

Two days ago, Dragon buried himself under the wood chips, presumably to start to shed.  And last night, he was out on top, with some shed remnants and clear eyes.

But he still wouldn’t eat the mice.  In fact, Rusty and I watched as he slithered along the back edge of the tank and one of the mice climbed up on his back — even onto his head — and was carried along for the ride, like one of those people-mover conveyor belts at the airport.  (It was kind of funny to see, actually.)

I decided that something had to be done.  The best way to get a pot to boil, a train to arrive, or something else to happen is to do something else, something which will get interrupted by what you wanted to happen in the first place.  So what we had to do was get attached to the mice, turn them into pets.  Then they would surely die!  And the first step in the process of making them pets — well, other than feeding them — was to give them names.  So we did…

George, Dick, and Donald.

(You figure it out.  No sense wasting good names on them if we wanted to get rid of them.)

This morning, Dragon was curled up at the top of the tree in his tank, no mice to be seen.

[Weblog title reference: From the theme song to The Mickey Mouse Club.]

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Updated on January 27, 2011