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writers and their pets

22/4/2014

2 Comments

 
So apparently this is National Pet Month, and I've surprised myself and somehow acquired a pet of my own. This is Little Bear. He arrived yesterday, with good timing: today I turn 25, which seems a good time to embark on a new beginning.
Picture
There's a long tradition of writers and their animals, though I don't know if any famous historical author was moved to write about a hamster. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning had her spaniel Flush, Virginia Woolf had her dog Pinka, and Lord Byron kept Bruin with him at university, and walked it around the courts of Cambridge on a lead (which all makes sense, except that Bruin was a tame bear). The famously macho Ernest Hemingway actually lived in a house full of cats, and Charles Dickens kept a raven and taught it to speak and perform 'comic turns'. I've never been quite sure how I feel about pets. As Virginia Woolf once wrote: ‘We deliberately transplant a little bit of simple wild life, and make it grow up beside ours, which is neither simple nor wild’. The whole process of 'buying' an animal, of 'owning' it, seems to me a strange one in a lot of ways - and I think there's a risk that even a well-loved animal becomes suffocated by its doting, anthropomorphising owner. It's only a few species of animals that seem to thrive in captivity, and I've never been sure that hamsters are one of them. This pet, however, was a bit different, since it was abandoned at a local rescue shelter. I saw the pictures of the small animals by chance, after looking with a friend at rescue dogs, and felt unexpectedly sorry for them too - they are often, apparently, abandoned with far more casualness and cruelty than the larger pets.

Kiran Desai wrote about the injustices we casually deal out towards animals in The Inheritance of Loss; this is the old, embittered judge speaking about his beloved Mutt: 'A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone any harm... The world had failed Mutt. It had failed beauty; it had failed grace.' On the one hand, in the middle of the great injustices in which the judge and his family find themselves entangled, this lamenting over a pet might appear comical, even obscene. But on the other hand, I'm not sure the animal's sufferings themselves are a thing to be treated lightly. We humans are self-important creatures. We look at our own lives with grandeur, and think of other creatures as somehow different in kind, less real - 'it's only an animal'. To treat an animal like a human, to talk to it in baby-language and hand-feed it chicken as the judge does, is clearly slightly ridiculous (Mutt probably finds it rather laughable too) - but to respect an animal like a human seems to me just.

I couldn't really take a dog from the rescue centre - I don't know where I'll be living in two years, or five, and I don't think a long-lived pet would appreciate being constantly uprooted. But a hamster was possible, and so I ended up with Little Bear. I didn't want to shut him up in a tiny cage, so I've made him a natural habitat. It's surprisingly rewarding to watch him learning to burrow, to climb, to dig in sand - something I don't think he had ever seen before. While I've been working on my book, he has also been busy in his tank in the corner of my office, constructing an elaborate tunnel and nest system. He's also built a toilet, a food hoard and a hill, and - for some reason best known to himself - buried an entire plant. Watching him crawl about organising his home, it's clear that his concerns, to him, are no less important than mine are to me. Which gives every life on this earth, and every labour, a certain kind of perspective. And that isn't a bad insight to come to on your 25th birthday...
2 Comments
Abdulatheem Ameer
22/4/2014 03:33:14 pm

interesting article, and Happy 25th birthday!
right now I have a canary (small singing yellow bird), it was a gift from my uncle 2 years ago.
and I used to have a small fish bowl at my writing desk.... and yes, it is now a dead bowl :'(

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Catherine Banner link
25/4/2014 04:49:04 am

Thank you!
That's sad to hear about the fishes. But a canary sounds like a good pet to have beside you as you write. I hope he sings a lot and inspires you...

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