WE couldn’t let National Love Your Pet Day, a day dedicated to show some extra appreciation and love for our furry friends, pass without taking time out to dedicate our blog to the animals who share our lives, or those who left a lasting impression – including a travel-sick dog and a much-loved snake.
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I REMEMBER the moment I told my mum I wanted a pet snake. “Oh thank God,” she said. “I thought you were going to ask for a dog,” writes Kirsty Green.
I’d begged for a St Bernard since seeing Beethoven at the cinema in 1992. But I was grown up by this point – a big 13 years old. I’d outgrown cute puppies.
My brother was less keen. We’d spent some years living in Africa – I was very young at the time, but my brother was old enough to remember snakes were things you avoided, and he was adamant he would not have one in the house.
And so it was that my brother helped my mum and dad put up a shed outside, underneath his bedroom window actually, which had an oil heater in it and would house my vivarium and my gorgeous Carolina Corn Snake, Nyoka. (Swahili for snake – just to annoy my tolerant brother more).
Doing snake research
Please don’t think my parents were a walk over. I had to produce presentations to prove I knew everything about snakes, their diet, required habitat, life expectancy and, very importantly, reinforce it would be a constrictor, not a poisonous snake.
So, evidence of my knowledge and maturity duly produced, I bought my little hatchling. I set aside a space in the freezer for the tiny mice I’d have to defrost each week for him to eat, bought his bark chippings and then sat watching him for hours do…well, very little.
To this day I still have the first skin he ever shed – it was tiny and only around a few inches long. When he was an adult, he was nearly six feet long.
A snake for all seasons
That snake saw me grow up. He saw me stress over GCSEs, stumble to my room tipsy after celebrating my A-Level results. He moved to university with me and into my first flat where he terrified my now mother-in-law when she visited.
He died aged 17 (above the average life expectancy for a corn snake).
I loved Nyoka. Of course he didn’t love me. I also realise now, as a mum myself, with a pet dog, just how savvy my parents were.
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HE is the only pet I have ever written a column on and he had the distinction of appearing in the Derby Telegraph’s long-since discontinued agony aunt photo casebook, so this isn’t the first time my cat, Timmy, has graced the written word, writes Simon Burch.
In fact, the first time I saw him was on a journalistic assignment, when I visited the Cats Protection League to report on an influx of cats looking for a home.
Timmy was one of them, albeit he was in the corridor where the new arrivals stay until such time they are given their jabs and a clean bill of health and moved to the other corridor, where the visitors get to see them.
What caught my eye was his bulk. He filled his cage and was pushing his body against the glass, demanding attention, as I walked by. My partner and I had been idly chatting about getting a cat and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It was quite odd.
Timmy’s backstory was that he had been reluctantly given up by his one careful lady owner because she was elderly and kept tripping over her as he wound around her legs at feeding time.
The only other thing I knew about him was that she lived at a sheltered housing complex and so Timmy would go from resident to resident, getting fed there as well.
This explained his size. Timmy was a lot of cat. When we took him to the vet for a check-up after getting him home they weighed him and he topped out at a hefty 8.4lb.
So, he was put on a diet, of dry medicated pellets, and the weight slowly came off.
Not a gentle giant
It’s fair to say that Timmy wasn’t a gentle giant. He was quite irascible and although he initially enjoyed being tickled, he could switch to attacking you in the blink of an eye. Another party trick was to run out from under bushes and pounce on people’s legs as they walked up the garden path.
In many respects he was a pain, and he shredded the carpet outside our bedroom door, trying to get in. And he was, regrettably, quite the predator.
It was through Timmy that I realised that captured frogs could play dead and that the only bits of a pigeon cats won’t eat are the beak and the stomach.
And I learned that cats growl when you pin them down in order to prise a bird from their mouths.
I’m not going to get into the dog/cat thing, but it is a mystery why people get so into cats, because they make quite peculiar pets.
Which is not to say you don’t end up loving them, but it’s the kind of love Kathy shows for Heathcliff – a yearning love for acceptance that cats are aloof and wily enough to keep spinning out for years.
Timmy was around for our children to be born and to grow up alongside and he had his place in the silly rhymes we made up about the world around us.
Festive treats
He also spoke to them during nonsense conversations and was also generous at Christmas, “donating” two chocolate selection boxes for the boys, complete with a label which read “From Timmy”.
Sadly, Timmy has long since died, taken from us by what we suspect was cancer, which reduced our beautiful barrel-chested young man to a sad, emaciated shadow who became unsteady on his once-nimble feet.
It was with a sense of relief that, given the option by his vet, we took the difficult decision to put him out of his misery, bringing his body back for a family farewell.
We laid him out on his favourite blanket so that we could all say goodbye, then wrapped him up and buried him in a February-cold grave in the garden.
I’ve never replaced him, but as they say in the best poetry, he’s never really gone away.
Gone but not forgotten
It isn’t so much that I expect to see him trotting around the corner, or hear his ghostly meowing in the night or anything like that, but the fact that he hasn’t allowed mere death to stop him/me from maintaining a tradition.
Because, every Christmas, I still attach a label to the boys’ selection boxes reading “From Timmy”, continuing to share his large largesse, fully 13 years (and counting) from when we laid him to rest.
FEW things make me smile as much as a dog sticking their head out of the car window, ears flapping in the wind, lapping up the sights and smells like the kids in a Bisto advert, writes Sarah Newton.
So, it is not without disappointment that my own dog treats every car journey a bit like a scene from a disaster movie. Imagine The Exorcist meets Fast & Furious, with a dash of Titanic melodrama thrown in for good measure – that’s our life every time we hit the road.
Because Teddy is travel sick. And when I say travel sick, I don’t mean he gets a little queasy. I mean, the moment the engine starts, my once-happy cockapoo transforms into a melting pile of misery and, before long, vomit.
In fact, you only have to say the word ‘car’ and Teddy starts trembling and, before anyone chips in, this isn’t a reflection of my excellent driving skills (ahem!) because he does it regardless of who is behind the wheel. Every trip with Teddy starts long before we even step out the door and while most dogs run to the door in excitement, Teddy slinks off behind the couch as if I’ve just announced a horror movie marathon.
All aboard a sinking ship
As we approach the car his ears are already flattened in anticipation of what he’s sure will be his last day on earth. He climbs in slowly, often with a helpful shove up the bum, like he’s boarding a sinking ship.
Usually, we are hardly off the drive before Teddy is swaying like a seasick pirate, drooling heavily all over my cream leather interior and despite all my best efforts – the car sickness meds, the open window, the plug-in pheromones – it’s never long before Teddy’s little stomach inevitably waves the white flag. (If you’ve never had to clean dog vomit from a seatbelt, consider yourself lucky.)
By the time we arrive, he wobbles out of the car like he’s just stepped off a rollercoaster, giving me one last look of pure betrayal.
Nothing works to stop the sick
We’ve tried everything to make car rides easier for him. Ginger treats? Check. Medication from the vet? Check. Playing classical music to soothe his nerves? Oh, you bet. From desensitisation sessions to trying all the locations from footwell to boot nothing helps our heaving hound.
I’d love to be able to head off into the Peaks for a long walk instead of sticking to virtually the same route around our own roads every day. But I don’t love him any less – even if I do occasionally dream of a more adventurous, less stomach-churning life.
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I GREW up with a dog and, briefly, a couple of pet mice called Snip and Snap, writes Lucy Stephens.
And over the years we’ve been home to an extremely malevolent hamster and four very small minnows. None of them gave us a lot by way of emotional feedback.
It’s fair to say that although I’m by no means a hater, I’m happy to keep animals at a distance – preferably in a field, or, at the very least, someone else’s house.
So, I was perhaps an odd choice to run the ‘Pet Idol’ competition when working as a reporter at the York Press in the noughties.
‘Pet Idol’ was one of those genius ideas that news editors have, often at a weekend, when there’s not a lot going on. They’ll come bounding in, make a beeline for your desk, and suggest things like:
“Today I want you to drive around the York ring road and see how long it takes you!”
“There’s one of these mysterious panthers on the loose. You’re going to dress up in a 1950s Safari suit and go and look for it.” (this last one did actually happen – just not to me).
So I probably got off lightly with ‘Pet Idol’.
Simple idea to create a gallery of pets
The idea was simple. Readers would be asked to send in pictures of their pets.
We would run the pictures in a huge gallery of photos. Favourites would be voted for and, in a blaze of glory, the ultimate York ‘Pet Idol’ would be announced.
I have to say that like many simple ideas, Pet Idol was a huge success.
My desk felt like the scenes in Harry Potter when the owls come swooping down with thousands of letters.
Every day I definitely had by far the most post, and a whole load of people gathering round asking if they could see (and have a jolly good laugh at) today’s photographic offerings.
Many pets were well-dressed
Everyone in York, it seemed, was keen to show off how adorable Tiddles the elderly family cat looked in her pink crochet earmuffs, or Jock the Scottie in a frankly ill-advised Tartan Tam O’Shanter.
Why so many people insisted on dressing up their pets I don’t know – we certainly didn’t ask them to.
I can’t quite recall which beast did eventually win Pet Idol. As campaigns go this one was definitely more fun in the build-up.
But what I did learn was, while I might feel ‘meh’ about pets, I’m definitely firmly in the minority.
