Dogs are cute. Cats are adorable. Hamsters are OK when they don’t pee in your hand. Geckos just want to bask under the hot lights—but who doesn’t?
I’ve been a part-time pet sitter for 15 years now, and for four of those worked full time, walking dogs, coaxing purrs from cats, and feeding live crickets to lizards. I’d like to tell you the life of a full-time pet sitter is as copacetic as one of those Scholastic posters from grade school with a pile of puppies under a rosy slogan like “Cute is an occupational hazard!”
And it’s true. Some pets are so overwhelmingly sweet you understand why nature created the human-pet dynamic. It’s hard, for instance, to forget dogs like Sushi the Shih Tzu or Buddy the cocker spaniel. Both dogs were so happy to see me—from the first meeting to the last—that they licked my hand like it’d been dipped in Skippy. I’d laugh like a child every time I came for a walk or a visit. It was love, pure and simple.
It was not so pure and simple for many other critters, of course. Bruno was the single male cat in a harem of 12 (is that even legal?). The black Himalayan did not cotton to a daily visitor who also peed from the standing position, if you get my drift. When he saw me, his orange eyes would narrow, and he would look a little like W.C. Fields about to unleash one of his noted invectives. I guess it was inevitable: One day, Bruno scratched me.
Scratches are pretty rare, thankfully. And they pale next to memories of Dax the marvelous mutt, Titus the slobbering mastiff, Rusty the Aussie genius, Mr. Boots the curious cat, and the rest of the gang. You usually don’t need peanut butter to make a best friend. You just have to show up.
