As one gets older, it is sad to reflect on the many much-loved pets who have gone before. My mother used to say their faces would flash before her in a passing parade. It is now the same for me as I advance in age.
As I write this, my laptop display image is that of my ginger Burmese cat Bo, long since departed.
There was mum's little budgie, whose name I forget, who would tweet "You know Debbie!" from a television commercial of the early 1960s.
There was one of Mum's chooks named Griselda, who would follow Mum around the Hills Hoist clucking and try to come inside with her.
There was a remarkable female cat named Horace, which I found as an abandoned kitten in Adelaide. Horace lived her full span of 17 years and seemed human. Once, when my misbehaving young son walked past her while she was sitting on the refrigerator, Horace gave him a clip across the ear.
There was a beautiful white boxer named Kelly who had the soul of an angel. When I lay on the floor, she would lie beside me and place her front leg around my neck.
There is an entire montage of the faithful creatures in my mind's eye as I write this, too numerous to mention here, but all remembered and mourned. I wish now that I had spent more time with each during their short lives.
It makes one reflect though, and ask how were those much-loved animals any different from those killed for food or so-called sport? Of course, there is no difference.
Fox is rescued by man and they become best friends
While I have reservations about animals being killed for food, I am too old to change my ways and will remain a meat-eater, but not without a feeling of guilt. If I had my time over again, and knew what I know now from life's experience, I believe that I would be a vegetarian. But I find it incomprehensible how anyone could kill any of these innocent creatures for self-gratification and call it sport. The heads of elks, tigers and lions that I used to take for granted in picture libraries in grand English houses, I now find repugnant.
To me, the big-game hunters of yore, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway, were no more than self-indulgent and unfeeling egoists. Even today, people travel to certain African countries on so-called Safaris in order to shoot almost any creature they wish, including elephants, lions, leopards, rhinos and buffalos, and all for kicks.
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Some cruelty to animals is well-documented. An example is the lifelong confinement of black bears for their bile in China and other Asian countries. They are confined for up to thirty years in cages in which they are unable to stand or turn around, and often have had their claws and some teeth ripped out without anesthetic. They have tubes inserted into their gallbladders by various means, and are milked of their bile twice a day for so-called medicine.
Another is the killing of animals with appalling cruelty for religious reasons. This has even been legalised in Australia, and generally involves slitting the creatures’ throats and letting them bleed slowly to death in pain and terror. How anyone with half a brain could imagine this as being pleasing to our Maker escapes me.
When you pass the chicken shop in the shopping mall, the counter is stacked with their breasts and drumsticks. It is as if the pieces have been manufactured on an assembly line (which is correct) from unfeeling and brainless creatures. One only has to own a bird to know that they are extremely intelligent and feel love, loneliness, terror, and pain. Each one is an individual.
My pet now is a little bird who controls my life, a peach-faced cockatiel named Zaki who is approaching 18 years of age. She is sitting on my shoulder as I write this. Given our respective ages and our possible lifespans, I have calculated that should I reach my father's advanced age at the time of his passing, then the two of us might check out on the same day.
Sorry Flysa - you know I can't resist!
While Zak and I muck on together and enjoy each other's company, I know that one day we will have to part company, and my housemate and dear friend Zak will leave me, or me her.
I like to imagine both of us flying off together into the sunset, to find those pets who have gone before waiting at Rainbow Bridge.
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