When my kid turned 2, the peer pressure to own a pet started mounting. His country cousins were rich with dogs, cats, cows and pigs with endless variations of inbreeding. Our tiny apartment had been home to a fish, but it jumped down a drain soon after we moved to Manhattan. Smart fish.
Adding a dog or cat to our small apartment seemed a bad idea. I often imagined a shortage of oxygen in the confined space and to add a normally aspirated animal would surely lead to the suffocation of something. If any of us suffered brain damage due to a greedy lung on four legs, I’d feel bad.
Other kids drag their rodent-like animals along the sidewalk. I assumed these leash weights to be dogs, although there was no resemblance to any real dog I’d ever seen. They could show up at feeding time of any zoo’s vermin room and get a full meal.
The fascination with these alleged pets was understandable. They were bred in designer colors, trained to sit quietly in a purse for hours with no food or water, and the scarcity of organic matter in their tiny bodies soothed the hypochondriallergic fears of the blog inspired supermoms.
My kid’s pet envy kept growing so I needed a creative solution. The idea of a starter pet seemed reasonable – something that would serve the purpose for now, but would be easy to dump when the real thing came along.
I’d known many people who bought starter houses or married started husbands, so the notion seemed sound. But animals with very short lifespans seemed high in maintenance or low on bonding moments.
Then it happened. The answer to my pet dilemma was spelled out on a sign in the pet store window: Free Hamster (with purchase of a cage). My kid was about to get a lesson in responsibility and excrement cleanup that only a first pet can provide.
Since my kid’s physical strength had progressed faster than his ability to control it, I was quite certain that the hamster would last only a few days. A week at the most.
In his child-hulk fashion, he’d give the hamster a hug just as he became hypnotized by a passing fire truck. After the truck passed, he’d release the hamster hug and the competition for oxygen in our apartment would be over.
Perhaps he’d cry over the lost life but the sound of another fire truck would be a balm for his sadness. And there’s a firetruck every 90 seconds. What a fine pet plan.
Another possible hamster homicide would be hard to prevent, but easy to hide. Flushing the rodent down the toilet could cause a nasty clog. But I’d already discovered one of the thousands of “oh it must have been the kid” free passes when our toilet clogged a few weeks after moving in.
Before kids, a clogged toilet equaled certain embarrassment. No questions. But with a kid, the range of clogging object are endless. I could never make out much of what the handyman said, but “kid, car, clog” was easy to understand and I was more than happy to blame the one resident of our apartment who couldn’t provide a defense.
The last obstacle to bringing home the hamster were the enclosed heat radiators in our apartment. There were plenty of rodent sized spaces between the enclosure and the wall, but no access panels to remove a scorched hamster.
But a simple silence when the handyman showed up would lead him to the obvious conclusion that a rat had crawled from another apartment to its scalding final resting place. As long as I waited an hour or so, the site of a roasted hamster would be indistinguishable from any common toasted rodent.
My plan was set. I’d bring home the free hamster and let my kid enjoy it to death. Literally. Then when anyone suggested I was a bad parent because my kid didn’t have a pet, I’d recount the sad story of George the hamster. I’d wax nostalgic and pontificate about joy and learning life lessons while being extra vague on cause of death and lifespan. I’d tear up a little if necessary.
The real brilliance to my plan was that by saving the receipt and pointing out that the hamster was part of a “free with purchase” promotion, I could return the cage after the funeral. The whole shebang would cost nothing more than a trip back to the store and a few tears from a two year old, neither of which would be missed by next week.
Everything would have gone off as planned if it hadn’t have been for that tiny, unwelcome voice of conscience. Since my plan required the death of a fellow creature of the universe, I started to feel guilty. Would I have to abort my plan?
That war waged only a few seconds, as all this had taken place while I waited for the light to change in front of the pet store. As I crossed the street, I realized the sensation in my gut that I’d interpreted as a moral war was just hunger. As my eyes moved from the pet store sign to a neon ‘PIZZA’, the soul searching question morphed into “one slice or two”?