I grew up always having dogs or cats in the house. They were not really pets as we know them today or animals that get showered with so much love and care like they were adopted siblings.
In those days, dogs were kept not just as pets but as security guards. Cats rid the house of rodents. At times, we had free range ducks, chickens, a pig, caged birds, fish and a turtle.
The fowl provided us eggs and meat on regular days. The pig was reserved to be butchered or roasted for big events like the fiesta, birthdays or Christmas. We didn’t always buy lechon; sometimes we just made a pit next to our house and roasted our own pig there. The caged birds, fish and the turtle did not really serve any function other than to be looked at as objects of beauty or curiosity.
These animals would come and go but dogs and cats were more regular. It was also common in those days to slaughter one’s own dog for dinner (and, yes, even cats for some). When our dogs made the mistake of biting any of us, my father would immediately sentence them to death. We saw the horror of how our dog ended up for lunch one day. He was brought down with an ax.
Yet it was not a traumatic experience at all. We saw dogs being butchered all the time. It seemed that some of our neighbors kept dogs as food like regular livestock. I could not forget how as kids we all sat around a bonfire below a newly slaughtered dog suspended from a bamboo pole with a chicken wire.
When the carcass had turned completely black, our neighbor invited all of us to slice a portion of the charred skin to be dipped in a bowl of coconut vinegar. It was barbaric, yet it was for me the best way to cook a dog.
With this prospect of your pet dog becoming dinner when the need arises, you simply understood that you were not supposed to become too emotionally attached to the animal. Dogs were your loyal friends but they could also be emergency food during hard times, which we refer locally as “tingbitay sa iro” (season for hanging dogs).
This must be the reason why until recently Filipinos were not too crazy about their pets, unlike the Americans and Europeans who would dress up their pets, sleep with them and mourn their deaths like they really belonged to the family.
My daughter, who never grew up seeing how her thickly battered fried chicken was slaughtered, cried so hard when Happy, her pet rabbit, died of heat stroke. That day Happy bought her extreme sadness.
After the rabbit’s death, we decided to keep only tiny animals as pets. We were still constantly moving from one rented house to another, or going somewhere for long vacations, so pets had to be easily carried in small boxes. We settled for a hamster that lived for only a few days after we tried to pamper it with a shower, a blast of the blow drier, and a sprinkle of baby powder. It had chills, fell down, and stiffened.
I also bought a white mouse from one of those pet sellers in Manalili Street. I asked the vendor to pick a male as I did not want to end up breeding mice. Unfortunately, he made a mistake twice: he got me a female mouse and it was pregnant.
The mouse soon gave birth to a litter of pink babies some of which were eaten by their own mother. The male mice that survived eventually became sexual partners of their own mother. It soon became a cycle of animal incest and cannibalism so disgusting I thought I must have been punished for my own attempts at eugenics and control of the rodent population.
Recently, after a long time of not having pets in the house, my wife brought home a hamster. We put it in a cage we had bought earlier from my wife’s Korean student whose family was selling their things after deciding to go back to Seoul for good. It was one of those rodent cages with colorful transparent tubes, an exercise wheel, and water bottle that looked like a space station.
The male hamster climbed the wire cage like Spiderman so my daughter called him Peter. In the wild, hamsters are territorial and nocturnal creatures that dig tunnels where they hoard grains and seeds they collect through their cheeks that uniquely fold into pockets. They hibernate during the day and become active at night. I did my research this time so I won’t end up killing my own pet with unnecessary pampering.
Peter instantly marked his favorite spot in the tube with wood shavings and sunflower seeds he collected from the small feeder bowl placed on the floor of the cage that I now called Mir (after the Russian space station).
He was hyper at night but slept during the day. Curled up in the tube most of the time, it seemed to us that he was bored to death.
So acting like God, we brought him a younger and still shiny golden female hamster. He groped the girl like a wild man upon first meeting, kissing and smelling her all over and finally taking her from behind. How human.