Bob
Hunter

STRICTLY PERSONAL

IT AIN’T easy playing God
in suburbia.

I refer to being a pet owner. You
thought | meant being a father and a
husband? Hah! That was another
era.

_ One of the few areas of domestic
life left where you still can play
God, in fact, is when it comes to
your non-human dependents.

Bor all the fancy reasons we
come up with to justify keeping
animals, even domestic animals, in
captivity, I think the main one is the
simple rush of dominance it gives
us.

A lot of relationships with ani-
mats arc inherently neurotic, OF
course, that can be said about a lot
of relationships, period.

Look at some marriages. Look at
some families, And take a good
look at sibling rivulries.

But with animals, the burden of
being entirely responsible for their
well-being, and having complete
control over their fate, combine to
give too much power to the pet-
owner, which means there's nath-
ing remotely equal or consensual
about the relationship.

The goldfish has nowhere to go.
Let ont of its cage, the exotic tropi-
cat bird will only dic. Once you've
brought thes creatures hoine,
you've got them for Jife. Theirs or
yours. Whichever ends first.

T described in a previous column
how thrilled our male budgie was
when we brought him home a mate,
but what I didn't tell you about —~
because it hadn’t happened yet —
was how he died.

We were trying to do the right

Playing God in suburbia a tough job

thing, you see. A tricky business in
the modern age of animal ethics.
We'd bought the bird in the first
place to please our daughter, and
only later did J start to read up on
the horrors of the international
exotic bird trade, both legal and
illegal.

The question became whether it
was the right thing to buy another
budgie, thus supporting the trade, or
leave the male to spend his life
alone.

The romantic view prevailed.
We picked up a female. We intro-
duced them to each other by putting
the cages side by side, and an
intriguing mating ritual followed
that closely mirrored the pattern of
our teenage son’s own courting
style.

Since we didn’t want to keep the
couple cooped up — the birds, that
is — we left the cage door open,
something the male had gotten used
to, and we'd accepted the price of
having to clean up after him.

But the female just kept crashing
around against walls and windows
until she broke a leg or a wing,
something we didn't discover until
morning, and by then she was dead.

The day after, the male budgie,
who had never been sick a day in
his life and was only a litte more
than a year old, fell over and died,
his wings spread as though flying.

When I suggested to the clerk at
the pet store that death must hava
been caused by a broken heart, she
laughed, as though [ was joking.

“That's what happens with those
birds,” she said, “If one goes, the
other goes,”

This suggests to me some kind
of profound bonding.

How does a creature make itself
die? Doesn't that go against every
so-called survival instinct? In any
event, that’s quite a trick,

We have been more successful
in trying to do the right thing for
our turtles, but so far, we haven't
really come to terms with the ethics
of keeping them, cither.

Ic turns out, because they are
red-cared sliders, you can't export
them from Canada, which means
you can't take them back to their
natural habitat in Florida or Mexico
and release them.

They were brought here and
bred before it became illegal to
cross the border with them. There
is, indeed, one group that can
arrange to truck them back down
south, but they would be placed ina

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turtle farm. Hmm. Doesn't sound
good.

In the meartime, as the turtles
grew from not much more than a
loony to something closer to Joaves
of bread, we have had to buy bigger
and bigger tanks.

Now we have a 100-gallon tank
sitting on top of a 60-gatlon tank,
the bottom one half-filled with
sand, so they can bask uader a heat
lamp when they get tired of swim-
ming.

Spoiled turtles? Wait for it. We
discovered one day, while cleaning
the tank, that the turtles were
delighted to be left on the floor so
they could clunk about. As long as
the basement doors stay closed,
there’s nothing they can do to hurt
themselves,

Accordingly. they have the run
of the downstairs. We are so used
to having them underfoot that not
once has anybody in the family
stepped on them.

Only a couple of times have they
made a mess, and then on the tiles
in the kitchen, in the same spot.

Turtles are tidy, believe me.

I built a pen for tiem outside
which allows them to trundie back
and forth the length of the lot.

And last summer, after the big-
ger turtie broke out of the pen and
charged straight into the swimming
pool, we discovered that they love

being in the pool.

We still worry about the chlo-
rine levels, but so far, the turtles
have shown no negative side-
effects at all.

We limit the amount of time
they can stuy in the pool to about an
hour before rinsing them off and
putting them back in their pen.

As a turtle existence goes, our
turtles would seem to have little to
complain about, relative to what
most turtles in captivity are experi-
encing.

994 - North Shore

Yet, what is the main activity of
our turtles? Trying to escape.
Trying to climb out of the pen. Ifa
door is left open, they’re clamber-
ing over the sill in a flash — well,
not quite a flash.

As for their tanks, they probe the
glass ceaselessly, looking for a way
out. Looking for mates, I guess. yet
if we buy a male for them, and they
breed, we perpetrate the whole
cycle for another generation. Tough
call, ch?

What would God do?

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