By Guinn Sweet | sweettalk@mineralwellsindex.com

“Let dogs delight to bark and bite, for God hath made them so…” according to a 15th/16th Century poet named Isaac Watts, in a poem, ‘Against Quarrelling’, line xvi. And that says it all about my feelings about dogs. No, I take that back; there are a lot of other things which are included in my wish not to be a dog-lover, dog-owner, etc., and these feelings overflow my cerebral area to include cats.

My lifetime of loving/hating dogs/cats (a cardinal sin in some folks’ thinking) has not always been the focus of my relationship with these animals. All this was brought to mind by my re-reading a very old issue of USA Today’s report on the emergence of the practice of animal psychiatry. This was published in the late 1990s, so you see how out of date some of my reading habits are. I remember when I first read it, it made me look back and see some dysfunctional dogs and a couple of neurotic cats we have owned.

I still remember a small terrier of ours, who suffered “small-dog” syndrome, by thinking he was a mastiff. We may have added to his dysfunctional self-regard by naming him Goliath when we should have named him “PeeWee.” If dog psychiatry had been known then, maybe we could have helped him deal with his smallness and he wouldn’t have attacked the neighbor’s German shepherd and died!

Another notable neurotic, Nero, was a cat who had the misfortune of living in a household (ours) which was not aware of the fragile psyche of pets. His presence in our household was strictly toward controlling the rat/mouse population of our rural home.

He was a good “mouser,” when he stayed home and attended to his chores, but upon aging he developed a wander-lust and a hostility that vastly changed his personality, so we had him “fixed.” Before long he was a fat, lazy sissy cat, lying around the house all day.

Not understanding that the extent of his physical alteration dictated the extent of his personality change, I insisted that Nero should live up to his name, go outside and fiddle around in the fresh air. Well-meant direction sent him up a tree by three neighbor dogs.

His large size prevented his climbing fast enough, leaving the majority of his large tail in a dog’s mouth. Nero was never the same after that; he became cat-a-tonic, sitting on the back of the couch and mutely staring at me all day, accusing me for his condition.

We had other animals with commensurate sad endings. Red, a mongrel show-off, seeking my attention, climbed a ladder and fell from the rooftop to the ground. He died while trying to take a bow for his performance. Pye, the mother of them all, lived to be an ancient 18 years of age, who got tired of life and committed suicide by catching a semi-rig on the highway. A big black lab, whom we jokingly named “Spot,” got the idea that he was a Dalmatian and was killed when a fire truck ran over him on the way to a fire.

Lastly, there was “Tweety,” our beautiful parakeet, who lost all of his feathers, even those on his head. He hated being bald so that he tried to hide his head under his wing, but there were no wing feathers to cover it. He soon lost his song and flew away. He left a note spelled out in birdseed, saying that he was joining the Air Force and training to be an F-16. Off he went, into the wild blue yonder, on his way to one day becoming a Bald Eagle!

After all of these losses of pets whom we had learned to love while they lived in our home, we were devastated and decided that we would never be pet owners again. There were some days when we missed them, but it has been so long ago that the pain is gone.

I am not sure that the psychiatry stuff is still available. I do know that our daughter has some pretty big expenses with special beds, foods, physical check-ups and that sort of thing. I haven’t asked her, but I am pretty sure there are no pet psychiatrists on her telephone “to-call” list. I think that we all can stop worrying about that and get back to being concerned about plagues, pestilence and simple dog/cat/bird food, but I am not getting into THAT again, myself!

P.S.: I still love pets if they belong to someone else and I can pat them and forget them.