I couldn’t concentrate on my conference call because I’m sitting at my kitchen and the newborn bunnies are hopping around outside, like little vibrating sock balls. We couldn’t tell which of our adult rabbits is the mother, because the newborns are all black and white, just like half the population. I say that somewhat jokingly, because truth is I’ve lost count on how many rabbits we have, but it sure felt like there are more of them, charging towards us whenever we enter the backyard, hoping to be fed.
Halfway through the call, I had to stop because three bunnies just squeezed themselves into the waterbowl. I would squeal if I had a soul, but the sheer cuteness did render me almost speechless.
I don’t remember a life before our family had pets. In a different life, my mother would be a farmer. I’m starting to understand why she made us read Little House on The Prairie when we were little – not only do they portray perfect little girls, but they also feature tutorials in hunting, foraging, breeding, feeding, and ultimately killing and cooking animals. From those books, I learned not only how to load a trifle with gunpowder, but also how to build a house from wood, how to make butter and cheese, how to cook a pig’s head, tails, you name it. I also learned how to weave straws as makeshift logs for fire during winter, but that may be less handy.
My mother is the kind of person who would stop and pet any passing cats or dogs. She is also the kind of person who, when realizing our cat has stolen a sausage from the dining table, would retrieve the sausage, shoo the cat away, re-fry the sausage and gave it to me. It took me a while to understand why I deserve a treat of sausage when the cat just stole one – like a match-a-treat situation? – until I realized what she did.
I still finished the sausage, though. Like my mom, I don’t let anything go to waste. I also enjoy cooing at rabbits and enjoying them as grilled meat on skewers, or feeding our plethora of fishes and eating them, deep-fried. I’ve heard that every children should have a pet because it gives them the responsibility of caring for a living being. I also know that it allows children the experience to deal with death – the inevitable, whether it’s something as alien as a goldfish or as warm fuzzy as the very dog that came in as a puppy when they were just toddlers. I know all this because I’ve experienced that, and more. Yes, there is life and death, but there are unexpected ways these can happen. The cat inexplicably got pregnant (one might give birth on your lap when you were a kid and didn’t know how this white slippery coccoon got here) and we need to figure out if we can afford cat food for these many cats. In a way, it was a relief that some of them died shortly after birth. The ones who live, though, need to learn how to hunt, and I will never forget leaving my bedroom one morning and stepping on the front part of a rat’s mouth. There were blood in the hallway and the kittens – all white – were mewing innocently, like they weren’t being serial assholes.
I also know what it’s like when fishes jump out of water and we would need to essentially revive them of their suicide attempts. Have you ever caught a fish on land and throw it back into water? You have? Now imagine a sea turtle. At the age where nobody in my school knows the difference between a turtle and a tortoise (“No no, this one has fins for legs”), my mom managed to procure, keep, and raise the sea turtle until it doubled its size and started eating the koi fishes that it was sharing a pool with. It killed us that he would mistook those supple jewels for the colorless frozen batch of dead fish we feed it. I tried Googling “turtles acting out”. We considered getting a female, but then we would probably start raising suspicion at the marine black market. In the end, we plucked him out of the pool (something almost as a dangerous as moving a crocodile, those nasty beaks) and gave him away to the SeaWorld. This is the equivalent of a dog farm, except this being a sea turtle, this was far from a metaphor of death – in fact, he may very well outlive us, as you might have remembered from Finding Nemo. We never visited him in SeaWorld and the turtle never waved back at us or any of that good stuff. Though we were never emotionally invested, I enjoyed having it for the same reason I enjoyed other animals: they are majestic creatures to witness. I particularly like the movements; to watch them swim placidly, hop around contentedly, walking around elegantly with their furry paws, just going about their business, oftentimes ignoring us being there. When I was in high school, a friend came to visit and upon meeting the cat, she laid down on the floor and began speaking to it. This went on until she realized my dad had been watching her the entire time, something he also reported to me with great amusement. “It was a full conversation!”
There are basically way too many animal stories to mention in one post. They would probably fill in one third of my autobiography one day. So I’ll say this as an ending: when I was away this year, all the rabbits died in an apparently freak accident of mass drowning. That was the story relayed to me. I’m just glad I wasn’t there when it happened. “Character Building” sounds cheesy until you put your finger on some obscure aspect of your life that very few seem to share, and how that sets your lives apart. For now, we are the household that owns three geese who travel in packs and would attack us and our guests, and they are our dogs. They will all die one day (hopefully) and who knows how we will say goodbye to these ones?
Tika Anindya 