10 things I hate about pets

Their promiscuity. Pets have no standards. They mate with everything, including stray animals and your couch.

1.  They are out to get you. A colleague once narrated a story of her friend, whose pet snake (!) hadn’t been eating for a few days. Every night, the snake would stay hungry and gaze soulfully at its owner. Eventually, she took her pet to the vet who had to put it down. The reason: the snake had been starving itself to build up an appetite and eat its owner.

2.  Pet owners: If you keep a pet snake, you deserve to be someone’s breakfast.

3.  These creatures will bring the internet to its knees. You might think there is unlimited space on the web. You will be proven wrong by the imbeciles who post photographs of their pets on Facebook and videos of them on YouTube. You might think your cat looks cute in a bow-tie; we don’t.

4.  Their depiction in popular culture. Hey, Timmie, Try getting stuck in quicksand for real some time. Lassie won’t be helping you out; she’ll be licking her nether regions.

5.   The battered-wife syndrome. Here’s a common refrain from pet owners: “It’s not poor Choo-Choo’s fault that he bit me. I should have made sure the water in his bath was one degree cooler.”

6.   Stubbornness. If your child refuses to eat his dinner, have a bath or sleep on time you will scold him, scream at him and maybe even smack him on the bottom. If your pet does all of that — and it will — you will just let it be.

7.   They are our masters. We scoop up their poo, play inane games with them and feed them by hand. The only good thing about this is that when an alien civilisation comes to conquer earth, they’ll go after the pets and leave us poor enslaved humans alone.

8.   Their promiscuity. Pets have no standards. They mate with just about everything, including stray animals and your couch.

9.   Their taste for luxury. There’s a reason why pet food is more expensive than anything else at Agha’s supermarket. They know money is no obstacle to keeping our pampered pooches happy.

10.   They bring out the eugenicist in humans. Pets turn us into Jospeh Mengle. We’ll gobble down just about every animal there is — so long as they’re not cute. The adorable ones we treat with tenderness, love and care. Pets make murderous racism acceptable.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2010.