"Bad Habits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

The Problem With Pets

Everybody should have a pet. Pets give you all the love and devotion of close relatives, but you can lock them in the basement for hours at a time if they get loud or boring. The pets, I mean.

Have you ever wondered why people have pets? Neither have I. I suspect it’s because pets are easy to talk to. I spend hours talking to my dog, explaining my views on world affairs. She always listens very attentively, although I’m not sure she understands me. If I could hear what she’s thinking, it would probably go like this:

ME: The situation in the Middle East certainly looks serious.

MY DOG: I wonder if he’s going to give me some food.

ME: It is unfortunate that an area so vital to the economic well-being of the world is so politically unstable.

MY DOG: Maybe he’ll give me some food now.

ME: The Russians certainly are making it difficult for our government to achieve a lasting Mideast peace.

MY DOG: Any minute now he might go into the kitchen and get me some food.

My first pet was a group of ants in one of those educational ant farms with clear plastic sides. My mother gave it to me for Christmas when I was about ten. She had to send away to Chicago to buy the ants. The ironic thing is that our house was already overrun with local ants, which came out during the summer in hordes. I mean, it was like one of those science fiction movies in which insects take over the Earth. Every summer we had huge, brazen ants striding around the kitchen demanding food and running up long distance telephone charges. My mother spent much of her time whapping at them with brooms and spraying them with deadly chemicals. Nothing worked. The ants used to lie on their backs, laughing at the brooms and the chemicals and calling for more.

What I’m getting at is that my mother hated ants, but she sent good money all the way to Chicago so I could have ants for Christmas. Christmas does horrible things to people’s values.

Anyway, I got the ants and put them into their ant farm and fed them sugar and water. The idea was that they would build a lot of ant tunnels and stuff and I would learn about Nature. Instead, they died. My mother was astounded. I mean, here she spends whole summers trying to kill local ants that she got for free, and these Chicago ants, ants that she paid money for, ants that had their own little farm and their own little food, just die. If we had been smart, we would have put our local ants into the ant farm and fed them sugar and water; that probably would have polished them off.

The lesson to be learned here is that insects make lousy pets. Even the best-trained, most intelligent, and most loyal insect pets tend to look and behave very much like ordinary common-criminal insects. Also you can’t explain your views on world affairs to an insect, unless you drink a lot.