I’m allergic to pretty much everything that occurs naturally in nature: grass, mold, dust. Oh, yeah, animals too.
The degree of my allergy to any of these things varies greatly – supposedly I’m allergic to feathers, but I can’t remember the last time I got near enough to anything feathered to know. I’m allergic to animal dander, but many dogs don’t bother me at all (pretty much all cats do, though).
It figures that my children are, as children usually are, animal lovers. They take it to a higher degree than most – preferring books about animals to any other subject (not including dinosaurs, which may be considered an animal, but they’re extinct, so, yeah… not so much). If I gave them the choice between a zoo or an amusement park, they’d take the zoo every time — and once we got to the zoo, we’d probably spend ten minutes staring at each animal. To me, that seems excessive – I think the zoo is one of those things you do kinda like window shopping — stroll up to each animal’s area, slow down to a mosey, give a once over, speed up and move on.
That’s not to say that I’m anti-animal. I was that kid in elementary school who loved horses so much that she had her dad take her to the racetrack just to see them run (Seriously).
But now my animal loving children have taken to shunning cartoons in favor of… ANIMAL PLANET. I’ve come downstairs in the morning to catch the girls watching televised dog shows – trainers dressed in dowdy clothing gallumphing around a course with their show dogs, the camera zoomed in on thick ankles in sensible shoes. Then there’s the show that’s like Supernanny, for pets – an animal trainer with severely cut bangs and wine-red lipstick tsk-ing at these silly pet owners who are engaged in struggles of power with their pets.
With every show, my daughters become more enamored of animals. “Can we have a bunny? Poodles are hypoallergenic? WHAT ABOUT A HAMSTER?”
No. Maybe so, but no. And NO.
Tonight, there was a blurb on Cairn Terriers (Picture Toto from “Wizard of Oz”). As soon as the announcer on the show mentioned that Cairns don’t shed much, the pleas for one of these rat-chasing dogs began. Thankfully, it was about bedtime and I was able to divert my daughters’ attention by directing them to go brush their teeth.
We have fish. I really thought that by getting the fish, we were finding a nice compromise – a pet that doesn’t make me sneeze and doesn’t require a pooper-scooper. But, nope. The begging for another pet – something, anything – persists. And I just don’t think I want to cave.
Do they still sell pet rocks?
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