It's A Wild WIld World!
Kaeiy is listening to: Jeepney - Sponge Cola
October 4 was World Animal Day! So to all the animals in the world: domesticated, wild and home-trained (hehe)... I salute you all.
I have always loved animals but as a child, I was picky about the animals I cared about and those I tortured beyond belief. Yes, I am guilty of animal cruelty. You know what PETA says, those that start with animals eventually progress to people. Well, it has been almost twenty years and I haven't found dead bodies in the backyard - mine or anyone else's, human or otherwise - that were slain by my hand.
My adventures into being a pet owner began at age 4. My dad got me a grown brown askal which I named Brownie. Sadly, he caught canine diarrhea and died in a month. I cried like mad for weeks. Then we moved house and I left my sorrows over Brownie in the old house.
Then my lil brother joined me in the new house. We used to catch garden spiders (our old house had a garden bigger than the floor area of our house, whch we lovingly called The Forest) and we would throw them on top of red ant hills. Then we'd melt plastic bottled mounted on sticks and "bomb" the red ants we just fed. Yup, PETA and Greenpeace offense in one (I'm sorry already! Get baaaccckk!) but what the hey! My brother and I finally stopped when we realized we were contributing to the increasing number of insect bites we received whenever we stayed in The Forest beyond 6pm (later, we found out my mom also got dozens of bite marks on her legs whenever she watered her plants so we quit altogether), not to mention global warming - which was not a hot topic back then, no pun intended.
When I got older, we chased the dragonflies that landed amongst our plants. When we caught one, lil Bro would promptly tie sewing thread on its butt and let it fly around like a demented kite. Same thing with frogs - we caught 'em by the dozens and stored them overnight in plastic pails. we released them the next day at nightfall, so they can "eat up all the nasty mosquitoes" in The Forest. One time, we caught a frog (theoretically, they are common garden toads - the kind you probably dissected in your high school and college Biology classes. I know I did!) so huge that we when it let loose a stream of pee, it filled up a cup of Magnolia ice cream. We tried to restrain it and successfully did so by putting it under a half-gallon can of Selecta ice cream (I remember it was Mantecado - my favorite next to chocolate) - which was a very tight fit, believe me. we released it in the deepest recesses of The Forest where it can happily gobble up even the dragonflies and the grasshoppers. My second brother was a baby then and he liked touching the cold-blooded hoppers and laughed when he got peed on. Talk about strange!
One Sunday my dad took me and my lil brother jogging, as was the ritual (then we'd buy special puto with a slice of cheese from the market and when we were lucky, there would be siomai for sale - I usually saved mine for lunch). We deviated from our normal route, which took us up into the hills. Lo and behold, I saw an army of tiny froglets (probably emerged from a pond a few meters away in a grassy vacant lot) jumping towards the road. They looked like huge, flesh-colored ants. I grabbed an empty container of ice lollies (with the top cut off) and stuffed as many of them as I could. If my memory serves me right, I was able to stuff 23 of them in the ice lolly container. When I got home, I stored them in a deep basin (for washing clothes so my mom was mad as hell when she saw what I did) I had sprinkled with a layer of damp soil. Later that day, my mom took me to the grocery store. I took 17 of the babies with me (I left the other 6 in The Forest so they can gobble up mosquitoes) and I happily dispersed them in the store, thinking they could eat moquitoes there too. Of course, it did not occur to me that they were probably too small to survive.
That same year, my second brother's godmother gifted him with a white rooster (he loves roosters - now he loves to eat chicken... konek?) which we named White in Ilocano. However, my dad decided to slaughter him 4 months later, since he usually got into fights with the neighborhood roosters (the little fowl was free to roam and he usually ended up on the other side of the fence, where several fighting roosters were kept). Needless to say, nobody ate the arroz caldo served that afternoon. It sat in the fridge for a week until it became a spoiled blob of porridge and chicken meat.
Two years later, at age 9, my second brother brought home a chick. You know, those reject male chicks that come from poultry farmers - those that usually end up as Day Zero or Day-Old chicks available at your local push-cart with tukneneng and kwekkwek (let's digress: the males are rejected upon hatching because male broilers consume more food than females to fatten up to the same weight). I immediately took to the helpless little thing and I took care of it like a baby. I vowed that it would not be slaughtered for any reason. It slept beside me in a shoebox filled with shredded newspaper and a crumpled facetowel. My second brother named him Tyrannus (the other three my lil brother bought were named Rex, Titanus and Titanic. Sadly, they died just three days later). He became my alarm clock. He'd wake me with his twittering, just in time for me to get to school on time (when Tyrannus was alive, I was never late for school - which I usually was though my house was three blocks from school) and when I got home, he'd meet me by the door. Due to my ignorance of normal chicken feeding, I fed him cooked white rice, strips of meat (a cannibal is what he turned out to be eventually) and lots of bugs from The Forest - grasshoppers, moths and an occasional damselfly. As a result, he remained just slightly larger than a chick but with full feathers that allowed him to go airborne. He lived in a cardboard box lined with shredded newspaper and he was spoiled by everyone in the household. His unfortunate end came in the form of a miniature tiger - a ginger feral cat that usually roamed The Forest. Before my afternoon ballet classes, I took a nap and was awoken by lil Brother shouting that Tyrannus was being eaten by a cat. Apparently, somebody (my cousin, I suspected) left the backdoor open so Tyrannus flew out of his box and took the chance to roam in The Forest (he was allowed to do so when we were with him). My mom, carrying my little sister (still a baby then and had a bum stomach), chased after the cat and hit it with a stick until it dropped the poor chick. It was too late.
We packed Tyrannus in a box of baby shoes (my baby sister's, if my memory is still functional) lined with newspaper and wrapping tissue. Then we gift-wrapped the box, glued a glow-in the-dark crucifix on the top and took it to the church. We buried the box in The Forest. The next day, lil Bro found a tombstone and installed it on the mound of earth that was the chick's grave.
A week after that, the Cat Burials began. Lil Bro and I caught cats (mostly adolescents) and I buried them in knee-deep holes. When they were grown cats, I'd tie their front and back paws together with yarn then bury them. If they were mere kittens, I'd bury them as they were. After filling the foot-and-a-half deep hole, we'd sit and wait if any creature comes out alive. If one did, we wished it a good life. If none did... well, better luck in their next life! When we left the house about two years later, I forgot all about those buried cats. Up until now, I'd rather not have cats for pets but I no longer have the urge to bury them. I even surprised myself when I adopted a white kitten a few years back. However, she went to visit with the other cats and apparently ate poisoned food meant for rats.
I did not have a pet for some time until my youngest sister brought home...tadaaaah!... a duckling! It was male, rejected for the same reasons as male chicks. It looked malnourished, stupid and ready to keel over and die any second. I named it Engot. Which evolved into so many other names (as is usually the case when you are part of my family) until it became Dookie.
The whole family loved Dookie so much that he slept in a cardboard box in our room (near the A/C because he apparently prefers the cold) and sometimes on our beds. When he grew too large to be a bedmate, we housed him in a rooster enclosure - dead center on the carpet of the living room with a floor of shredded newspaper. He would accompany us to family outings and family gatherings. He ate with us at Dampa (and ammused the gay waitresses to no end), took a trip with us to Caliraya and Paete, swam in the beaches of Ilocos Norte and splashed in the rivers of Abra. We celebrated each birthday with a cake, candles and spaghetti. He died at the age of four years and 4 months.
I swore I did not want another pet.
In February of this year, my baby Rex (a male Yellow Labrador) turned one year old. He is fiesty, fat, big and quite a handful but is nevertheless a lot of fun. To walk him is a struggle (he drags me on the street) and to be in his path when he wants something is disaster. He belongs to my two uncles (Rodj and Dindey) but I was able to spoil him like I usually spoil my pets. Hehehe...
Three weeks ago, our newest baby -mine and Jeni's - went to heaven to join the other little ducklings that populate Heaven's Pond (haha!). We sure will miss the sweet little thing. My friend, Greyzie, gave me a picture frame with a duckling on the corner as a belated birthday gift so, she said, we won't miss Baby Dee too much.
So! Belated World Animal Day, y'all. Remember, animals are friends! Not food! Be kind to animals, especially your seatmates. *peace*
-o-o-o-o-o-
""Bumaba ako sa jeepney
Kung saan tayo'y dating magkatabi..."
October 4 was World Animal Day! So to all the animals in the world: domesticated, wild and home-trained (hehe)... I salute you all.
I have always loved animals but as a child, I was picky about the animals I cared about and those I tortured beyond belief. Yes, I am guilty of animal cruelty. You know what PETA says, those that start with animals eventually progress to people. Well, it has been almost twenty years and I haven't found dead bodies in the backyard - mine or anyone else's, human or otherwise - that were slain by my hand.
My adventures into being a pet owner began at age 4. My dad got me a grown brown askal which I named Brownie. Sadly, he caught canine diarrhea and died in a month. I cried like mad for weeks. Then we moved house and I left my sorrows over Brownie in the old house.
Then my lil brother joined me in the new house. We used to catch garden spiders (our old house had a garden bigger than the floor area of our house, whch we lovingly called The Forest) and we would throw them on top of red ant hills. Then we'd melt plastic bottled mounted on sticks and "bomb" the red ants we just fed. Yup, PETA and Greenpeace offense in one (I'm sorry already! Get baaaccckk!) but what the hey! My brother and I finally stopped when we realized we were contributing to the increasing number of insect bites we received whenever we stayed in The Forest beyond 6pm (later, we found out my mom also got dozens of bite marks on her legs whenever she watered her plants so we quit altogether), not to mention global warming - which was not a hot topic back then, no pun intended.
When I got older, we chased the dragonflies that landed amongst our plants. When we caught one, lil Bro would promptly tie sewing thread on its butt and let it fly around like a demented kite. Same thing with frogs - we caught 'em by the dozens and stored them overnight in plastic pails. we released them the next day at nightfall, so they can "eat up all the nasty mosquitoes" in The Forest. One time, we caught a frog (theoretically, they are common garden toads - the kind you probably dissected in your high school and college Biology classes. I know I did!) so huge that we when it let loose a stream of pee, it filled up a cup of Magnolia ice cream. We tried to restrain it and successfully did so by putting it under a half-gallon can of Selecta ice cream (I remember it was Mantecado - my favorite next to chocolate) - which was a very tight fit, believe me. we released it in the deepest recesses of The Forest where it can happily gobble up even the dragonflies and the grasshoppers. My second brother was a baby then and he liked touching the cold-blooded hoppers and laughed when he got peed on. Talk about strange!
One Sunday my dad took me and my lil brother jogging, as was the ritual (then we'd buy special puto with a slice of cheese from the market and when we were lucky, there would be siomai for sale - I usually saved mine for lunch). We deviated from our normal route, which took us up into the hills. Lo and behold, I saw an army of tiny froglets (probably emerged from a pond a few meters away in a grassy vacant lot) jumping towards the road. They looked like huge, flesh-colored ants. I grabbed an empty container of ice lollies (with the top cut off) and stuffed as many of them as I could. If my memory serves me right, I was able to stuff 23 of them in the ice lolly container. When I got home, I stored them in a deep basin (for washing clothes so my mom was mad as hell when she saw what I did) I had sprinkled with a layer of damp soil. Later that day, my mom took me to the grocery store. I took 17 of the babies with me (I left the other 6 in The Forest so they can gobble up mosquitoes) and I happily dispersed them in the store, thinking they could eat moquitoes there too. Of course, it did not occur to me that they were probably too small to survive.
That same year, my second brother's godmother gifted him with a white rooster (he loves roosters - now he loves to eat chicken... konek?) which we named White in Ilocano. However, my dad decided to slaughter him 4 months later, since he usually got into fights with the neighborhood roosters (the little fowl was free to roam and he usually ended up on the other side of the fence, where several fighting roosters were kept). Needless to say, nobody ate the arroz caldo served that afternoon. It sat in the fridge for a week until it became a spoiled blob of porridge and chicken meat.
Two years later, at age 9, my second brother brought home a chick. You know, those reject male chicks that come from poultry farmers - those that usually end up as Day Zero or Day-Old chicks available at your local push-cart with tukneneng and kwekkwek (let's digress: the males are rejected upon hatching because male broilers consume more food than females to fatten up to the same weight). I immediately took to the helpless little thing and I took care of it like a baby. I vowed that it would not be slaughtered for any reason. It slept beside me in a shoebox filled with shredded newspaper and a crumpled facetowel. My second brother named him Tyrannus (the other three my lil brother bought were named Rex, Titanus and Titanic. Sadly, they died just three days later). He became my alarm clock. He'd wake me with his twittering, just in time for me to get to school on time (when Tyrannus was alive, I was never late for school - which I usually was though my house was three blocks from school) and when I got home, he'd meet me by the door. Due to my ignorance of normal chicken feeding, I fed him cooked white rice, strips of meat (a cannibal is what he turned out to be eventually) and lots of bugs from The Forest - grasshoppers, moths and an occasional damselfly. As a result, he remained just slightly larger than a chick but with full feathers that allowed him to go airborne. He lived in a cardboard box lined with shredded newspaper and he was spoiled by everyone in the household. His unfortunate end came in the form of a miniature tiger - a ginger feral cat that usually roamed The Forest. Before my afternoon ballet classes, I took a nap and was awoken by lil Brother shouting that Tyrannus was being eaten by a cat. Apparently, somebody (my cousin, I suspected) left the backdoor open so Tyrannus flew out of his box and took the chance to roam in The Forest (he was allowed to do so when we were with him). My mom, carrying my little sister (still a baby then and had a bum stomach), chased after the cat and hit it with a stick until it dropped the poor chick. It was too late.
We packed Tyrannus in a box of baby shoes (my baby sister's, if my memory is still functional) lined with newspaper and wrapping tissue. Then we gift-wrapped the box, glued a glow-in the-dark crucifix on the top and took it to the church. We buried the box in The Forest. The next day, lil Bro found a tombstone and installed it on the mound of earth that was the chick's grave.
A week after that, the Cat Burials began. Lil Bro and I caught cats (mostly adolescents) and I buried them in knee-deep holes. When they were grown cats, I'd tie their front and back paws together with yarn then bury them. If they were mere kittens, I'd bury them as they were. After filling the foot-and-a-half deep hole, we'd sit and wait if any creature comes out alive. If one did, we wished it a good life. If none did... well, better luck in their next life! When we left the house about two years later, I forgot all about those buried cats. Up until now, I'd rather not have cats for pets but I no longer have the urge to bury them. I even surprised myself when I adopted a white kitten a few years back. However, she went to visit with the other cats and apparently ate poisoned food meant for rats.
I did not have a pet for some time until my youngest sister brought home...tadaaaah!... a duckling! It was male, rejected for the same reasons as male chicks. It looked malnourished, stupid and ready to keel over and die any second. I named it Engot. Which evolved into so many other names (as is usually the case when you are part of my family) until it became Dookie.
The whole family loved Dookie so much that he slept in a cardboard box in our room (near the A/C because he apparently prefers the cold) and sometimes on our beds. When he grew too large to be a bedmate, we housed him in a rooster enclosure - dead center on the carpet of the living room with a floor of shredded newspaper. He would accompany us to family outings and family gatherings. He ate with us at Dampa (and ammused the gay waitresses to no end), took a trip with us to Caliraya and Paete, swam in the beaches of Ilocos Norte and splashed in the rivers of Abra. We celebrated each birthday with a cake, candles and spaghetti. He died at the age of four years and 4 months.
I swore I did not want another pet.
In February of this year, my baby Rex (a male Yellow Labrador) turned one year old. He is fiesty, fat, big and quite a handful but is nevertheless a lot of fun. To walk him is a struggle (he drags me on the street) and to be in his path when he wants something is disaster. He belongs to my two uncles (Rodj and Dindey) but I was able to spoil him like I usually spoil my pets. Hehehe...
Three weeks ago, our newest baby -mine and Jeni's - went to heaven to join the other little ducklings that populate Heaven's Pond (haha!). We sure will miss the sweet little thing. My friend, Greyzie, gave me a picture frame with a duckling on the corner as a belated birthday gift so, she said, we won't miss Baby Dee too much.
So! Belated World Animal Day, y'all. Remember, animals are friends! Not food! Be kind to animals, especially your seatmates. *peace*
-o-o-o-o-o-
""Bumaba ako sa jeepney
Kung saan tayo'y dating magkatabi..."
