Having pets can bring pleasure to your life if you concentrate on the good parts. The unconditional love is great, but the cleaning up puke and rushing around to find prescription dog food without a prescription and the never-ending poop scooping tends to take away a little from that enhancement of the quality of your life. It’s almost like taking care of pets is a concrete example of what life is really all about: picking up someone else’s shit.
Sometimes you decide you need a break from it all, the routines and doldrums of everyday life, and so you plan a vacation. But oh crud, what about your pets? Who will care for them, nurture them, and make them feel loved while you enjoy a week on the beach of sidestepping someone else’s dog crap? Boarding is always an option, although not without its own drawbacks, especially the cost and inflexibility of hours. I have several friends who have called a trip a few days short just because the kennel closed early on the weekends. Plus, how stressful is a kennel for your pet, who is accustomed to licking food off your fingers and sharing your pillow? Suddenly, you desert them in a hostile environment with strange dogs barking at all hours. It could make even the bravest of pets have an upset stomach in the backseat of your car on the way home.
Cats are a whole other story. Boarding would really be a last resort kind of option for me, because it takes all my strength, and by that I mean actual physical strength, to force my cats inside the car for a five minute drive to the vet’s office. I cannot imagine the ordeal it would be for me to board them, let alone how they might feel about it. Hiring a pet sitter is the easiest way to keep them at home, but when you tack the expense for that on top of a vacation, even a cheap weekend getaway, it adds up.
So I prefer to have a friend come to my home and feed them when I go out of town. I like to ask a friend who also has pets so that we can help each other out by taking turns caring for our pets while each of us finds something better to do out of town. Plus, it’s free. But like all things in life, friends pet sitting for friends has a dark side.
My friend BD and I have exchanged pet sitting several times over the course of our friendship, but lately, it just doesn’t seem to be working out. She usually boards her dog, who on a good day, with her loving family at home, could still bring western civilization to its knees with her enthusiastic tail wagging and jumping and cushion chewing and shoe snacking and homework eating. When I go over to BD’s house, the dog is so excited to see me she bounds in front of the car and waits there excitedly where I can’t see her, so that I never know if that day is the one I ran over her dog.
The cat, however, stays home and does what he does best, which involves filling the downstairs toilet with unrolled toilet tissue and knocking things off the counter. I’m used to that part, but BD recently expanded her menagerie to include a turtle and a hamster, so they are part of the pet care package. BD gave me a crash course in turtle and rodent care before she left town, and I felt fairly confident I could handle the responsibility. Wrong, as usual.
The first day I went over there, I dropped the hamster’s water bottle behind the dresser on which his cage sits. I tried to move the dresser out from the wall to retrieve the bottle, but it was stuffed with ten tons of business cards and brochures for BD’s job, so it wasn’t budging. I next scooted the end table next to the dresser away from the wall and tried to shimmy myself between the two pieces of furniture, but since I am not two dimensional, it didn't work. I got down on the floor and tried to peer into the dark underneath the dresser so I could at least see where the water bottle went, with no luck. I had no choice but to summon Incredible Hulk strength and walk the dresser away from the wall just enough so I could contort my arm and squeeze it behind, blindly feeling for the water bottle. Which was leaking a little, and very full. Right when I thought my arm was going to rip out of its socket, I felt the bottle with my fingers, grabbed it, and squirted water all over the wall while trying to get my arm loose. I was able to get my arm free, and it took significantly less than 127 hours.
I fed the turtle his dried shrimp and pellets after I finished with the hamster. Turtle food, by the way, smells a lot like a store in Chinatown. The turtle's little plant had come loose from the gravel and was bobbing along in the water, but I had had enough of sticking my hands in places I didn’t want to for one afternoon.
I returned every day for more of the same, but a few days later, the filter on the turtle tank was making a horrible noise. Smoke wasn’t coming out of it, but I had this mental image that I would make the turtle into soup and then burn down the house. I texted BD, who was coming home the next day, and she said to just unplug it, which I did. The water level also seemed low to me, but I don’t know nothing about caring for no turtles, so I tossed him a couple of extra dried shrimp and got the hell out of there. BD came home the next evening. During those twenty-four hours, that damn turtle rearranged all of the props in his tank, stacking everything against one glass wall before making his great escape. Curiously enough, BD found him behind the dresser.
When BD sits my cats, she too gets to experience the same kind of fun. My kitties get quite distraught when I go out of town, and they soothe themselves by chewing up the houseplants and vomiting them all over the place, a little bit at a time. I can be gone for less than two nights and find at least three little puddles of puke. BD has told me that a visit to the cats always involves one such surprise.
One time this summer, the cats took it a step further than the usual chew and spew. I had left their large container of cat food on the counter near where their food bowl is in my laundry room. BD came one evening in a rush, only to discover that one of the cats had knocked the very full container off the counter, causing the lid to pop off and kibble to scatter all over the floor. It wasn’t just a pile of cat food; it was fifteen pounds of dry cat food from the far wall to the doorway, like a rug of food. In fact, you couldn’t even see the rug underneath because of all the cat food. BD spent the next thirty minutes sweeping up as much of the food as she could, from under the washing machine and near the littler box and by the attic and every other square inch of laundry room floor. Teeth marks were visible on the lid to the container.
Maybe it just seems like pet sitting for each other is a favor, but in reality, it is more work and a bigger pain in the ass than just a simple “come over and feed the cat” or “all you have to do is count out twelve turtle pellets.” Our pets, like us, are rife with quirkiness and a tendency for melodrama. Maybe next time BD or I go out of town we should dress up the cats and the hamsters and the turtle as dogs and try for a group rate at the kennel. I am sure they have a contingency plan for animals hiding and frequent hysterical vomiting. And they work for a fee, not a favor.
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