*laughs* My family...and I...have a really bad pet record. Now we're not animal-haters, we're all for conservation and all, but...pets and us don't work well. ...Correction: animals and us don't work well.
So...for amusement purposes only and not grounds for being hauled to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I'm just going to describe my family's...relationship with animals. Before I get into this, I (would) swear that our family is cursed with a Strange Pet Death curse. I dunno what's with our pet care, but every single pet we've ever gotten died in premature and unusual ways. Even pets that we pet-sitted died. It's not like we're a family of pet-murders - at least, not all of us. But then again, that was an accident. All of them were.
We don't even have usual pets. I mean, most families have a dog or cat, you know? And if they ever write about their pet dying unusually, they usually write some mushy story about how the pet got hit by a car or got lost or something. Well, ours is anything but mushy.
In the beginning, we had fish. Now I don't exactly know how fish are supposed to die normally, but I think they're just supposed to float to the top, right? And look dead with that funky mouth all open and stuff, like in the pictures you see in "National Geographic."
Well, (almost) all of our fish got sucked up into the water filter. Sometimes we would find a fish woven through the tube that the filter uses to suck up the water. It was really gross, and kinda stupid, if you ask me. I mean, if the fish has been swimming around that boring tank for two years and then decides to swim up the filter and die...
And we also had a killer fish. Or something like it. When the killer fish was alive, we would always find the dead fish without eyeballs. We thought that the killer fish killed by eating other fish's eyeballs. Or maybe he was a scavenger that liked to eat eyeballs after fish died. But then later the killer fish died too (by being sucked up the filter also.)
Then there was the gurami. That was the fish that decided to jump out of the tank and onto the floor, just when Mom ran over him with the vacuum. I came down the stairs to see my mom sticking up some chopsticks in the vacuum to get the gurami out. That was like, really weird.
So after we got tired with fish, we decided to get a hamster, a little rodent that has no tail and is bigger than a mouse but smaller than a rat. He was okay, I guess, but then he went insane or something. I came home from school to find our hamster dead in a bucket. It seems that somehow he squeezed himself through the wires of the cage and got loose. That is like, a hamster Houdini action. I mean, somehow a hamster the size of a milk cap squeezed himself through a wire square the size of a penny. I dunno how that hamster squeezed himself through that tiny hole, but I'm pretty sure that when he did, his brain got seriously squashed and he went mental. So when he got loose, my mom totally freaked and somehow caught the hamster and sometime later, he "kicked the bucket."
Yeah, and then there was the crayfish episode. One of my friends was going on vacation and she needed someone to pet-sit her pet crayfish. We kept it in a cooler with some water in it. But one morning we found the crayfish a good thirty feet away from the cooler. I still don't understand out the crayfish got out of the cooler and crawled thirty feet in a dry environment, but that crayfish did it and died in the process.
After the hamster, my family decided to get gerbils. They're like mice, except they're bigger and (supposedly) live longer. This is the timeline of our gerbil legacy:
We get two gerbils from the same litter, which the storeowners say are both male. (But they're not.)
We later find out that one is a female instead. They have 6 kids, totaling for one weird family tree - I mean, sister + brother = gross...The female has two more kids, but then one gets mysteriously lost and the ravenous mom eats the other. Two kids are given away to a friend. The father and one son is given away to a different friend, but the friend is allergic, so they're returned, except the father mysteriously gets lost...
There is a rebellion within the gerbil household and the three kids kill their own mom. Throat slashed out and everything. Freaky.
Now there were only four kids are left. Two kids died from some mysterious sickness. They get all weak and stuff and can't crawl and it was really freaky, but they die nevertheless. One kid croaks dead mysteriously. No warning, no marks, nothing. This happened all within two months of each other - and in the wintertime. So we couldn't exactly bury them because the ground was like a rock. So we left them out in the garage in these little plastic bags for a good number of weeks. Then we finally decided to chip a ditch and stick a rock over them. I dunno how any pet-owner buries their pet in the winter, but the ground might have been steel for all that we could have done.
The last gerbil left was the runt of the litter. The littlest, and perhaps the sturdiest one. But even she couldn't live to a happy, ripe old age and die in her sleep. I (would) swear it was an accident. I really do. I took her outside, for some fresh air, because it was spring and all. And then she decided to run for the bushes, the kinds that are real close to the ground. And I couldn't let her run underneath them, because then I might not be able to get her out. So I stuck my foot out to block her. And I...I...stepped on her. I swear it was an accident. I didn't mean to. Really. But she's just a small gerbil, and I'm *much* bigger. It wasn't exactly my fault. She went nutso and ran around like a chicken (you know, how a chicken can run around even though their head is chopped off) and then she died. I swear it was an accident. I buried it and all. I stuck on a flower and put on a white stone and everything. It was really sad.
It's like our family is cursed. Every single pet we've ever had has to die prematurely. They can't live to be old pets and die happily in their sleep. If we ever get a cat, I predict it will die from electrocution. And if we ever get a dog, it'll probably die because I crushed it with the garage door or something equally weird. Our family should forget having a pet - or else the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would stalk us for the rest of our days.
* * * * *
Well, we did get a dog.
But we don't have it anymore.
...I'll leave it to your imagination. ^_~;;;;;
* * * * *
Among our other bad animal experiences:
- My dad mowed over a nest of baby bunnies. Pretty nasty.
- A deer hit my dad's car. Both survived.
- A spider falls on my sister's jacket, near her shoulder. She shrieks like there's no tomorrow.
- I get stung by a bee because I petted it. Ok, so I thought it was a wood chip. Obviously, it wasn't.
- We deal -- repeatedly -- with a very determined chipmunk that's digging a hole underneath in our patio / front door. I mean, we stuff the hole up with dirt, bricks, plastic covering; we've tried "suffocating" it with car exhaust; I mean, ok, the only time we need to kill/get rid of an animal and we fail? XD
