Too Much Monkey Business

“You don’t understand my animals!” shrieked Evelyn to me over the phone. Ah, so long ago, but these I consider one of many famous words & phrases spoken by the dearly departed Evelyn. I always asked her to explain her animals to me, but she claims that every time she tried to explain them, I made a joke about it, whenever I had the chance. It was my way of lightening up the situation. Such is life with a so-called sensitive one. Come to think of it, I think she would have made a better actress than animal husbander.

Evidently, there are a lot of people in the world just like Evelyn who can’t take a joke when it comes to that subject. Someone once told me that her cat felt just like a sister to her. A sister? Well, that’s stretching it a little too far for me.

But, keeping that in mind, I decided to go surfing on the Internet for pet & animal websites and believe or not, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of websites dedicated to people’s pets. The drivel they write about a dying dog, cat or bird is so pathetic & shallow. And why do I think that? Because even though a person mourns & laments over the former soul of an animal, they know that it will be replaced by another soul that they will get to know, love, cherish & honor.

Some folks like Evelyn have often accused me of not having compassion or understanding animal behavior at all, which is incorrect. See, I really don’t want to be a slave-master toward them, which in effect pet owners are. Pets eat whatever their owners feed them, be it scientific dietary pellets, ice cream or table scraps, live with the way they are treated, sleep where they are designated to sleep, take commands & are belittled, mistreated & once in a while if they are really “good,” then they will receive a treat.

Pets are unconditional recipients. They take what they are given and that’s that. They have no values of their own. They are taught what the slave-master wants them to know. Kind of like naïve prostitutes. Some, on the other hand would argue that they don’t and have seen the behavior for themselves, but rest assured, you can condition & train animals all you like, just as some corporations and governmental agencies train their humans to jump through hoops, shuffle paperwork & talk when spoken to.

When I was growing up, we had no pets in our household, save for Joey’s goldfish named Becky. My eldest brother Louie’s always had cats, while Joey has a dog, my only sister Naomi, Benjy & myself have no pets, although I did have 17 mice a couple of months ago. Even my Mom as a young girl growing up had a turtle, while Dad had no pets that I know of either. Mom & Dad have plenty of coyotes, bobcats, diamondback snakes & mountain lions, along with jack-a-lopes, lizards and other wildlife in their own backyard now, so no need for pets for them.

Okay, I admit it; I have a slight complex against animals. I’ve been scratched by “friendly” cats, bitten by a brown recluse (spider) and even bitten by dogs who “knew me” while thinking to protect its slave-master, which in that case, was my crazy landlady. So, yeah, I have a slight bias, but so what?

Even more so, there are some humans that can be so very cruel, as they breed dogs & cats for one purpose only, which is cash crop. Then there are puppy mills & cat farms, and a lot of owners who let their four-legged pets run amuck in the neighborhood & impregnate the first piece of ass that they find fit to straddle and disappear. Kind of like some humans.

Then of course, I couldn’t forget those ever-so popular jails we house “wild” animals in, commonly called zoos. Well, I guess those animals aren’t too wild anymore, even if zoos create natural habitats to make animals feel more at home, though I highly doubt a fiberglass mountain will do much good for a gazelle to run back and forth on, all day, everyday. No, they are caged animals who have no understanding of what freedom truly is.

There are some animal activists who call for their release back into the wild, where they truly belonged to begin with, but the trouble with this idea, is that animals do become too dependent on their keepers & handlers. Again, kind of like the way domesticated pets have become too dependent on their slave-masters and probably couldn’t fend for themselves for very long if given the chance.

This point is pushed across very well in an old Max Fleischer cartoon short from the late 1930s featuring Popeye The Sailorman, in which he comes into a pet shop, buys all of the animals and lets them go free. Panel after cartoon panel, the animals are shown in what appears to be terrible consequences, due to Popeye’s kindness for giving them freedom. Even an old parrot sitting on a perch scolds Popeye for his action and sings to him a song entitled, “Leave Well Enough Alone.”

But those daring animal activists, oh how they tell us otherwise. They would rather see animals go free, see animals get fair treatment in this world. PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals) advocates the same principal and then there are the animal terrorist groups who in the middle of the night conduct animal rescues, raids and destroy equipment inside laboratories that experiment on animals, thereby setting them free. Once these creatures, sometimes three-legged or less-legged, full of holes & disease that once put out in the real wilderness of domesticated America, will more than likely die a much quicker and painless death anyway.

You know, come to think of it, I have even a greater solution for this mess. Why not just domesticate humans that domesticate animals? The apes did it in all of those “Planet Of The Apes,” films & they had that routine down solid! What’s that you say? You say it’s been done already? Oh no! I’m sorry. You’re confusing slavery with bravery.