Patriot Realm

As one gets older, it is sad to reflect on the many much-loved pets who have gone before.

My mother used to say their faces would flash before her in a passing parade. It is now the same for me as I advance in age.

As I write this, my laptop display image is that of my ginger Burmese cat Bo, long since departed.

There was mum's little budgie, whose name I forget, who would tweet "You know Debbie!" from a television commercial of the early 1960s.

There was one of Mum's chooks named Griselda, who would follow Mum around the Hills Hoist clucking and try to come inside with her.

There was a remarkable female cat named Horace, which I found as an abandoned kitten in Adelaide. Horace lived her full span of 17 years and seemed human. Once, when my misbehaving young son walked past her while she was sitting on the refrigerator, Horace gave him a clip across the ear.

There was a beautiful white boxer named Kelly who had the soul of an angel. When I lay on the floor, she would lie beside me and place her front leg around my neck.

There is an entire montage of the faithful creatures in my mind's eye as I write this, too numerous to mention here, but all remembered and mourned. I wish now that I had spent more time with each during their short lives.

It makes one reflect though, and ask how were those much-loved animals any different from those killed for food or so-called sport? Of course, there is no difference.

Fox is rescued by man and they become best friends

While I have reservations about animals being killed for food, I am too old to change my ways and will remain a meat-eater, but not without a feeling of guilt. If I had my time over again, and knew what I know now from life's experience, I believe that I would be a vegetarian. But I find it incomprehensible how anyone could kill any of these innocent creatures for self-gratification and call it sport. The heads of elks, tigers and lions that I used to take for granted in picture libraries in grand English houses, I now find repugnant.

To me, the big-game hunters of yore, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway, were no more than self-indulgent and unfeeling egoists. Even today, people travel to certain African countries on so-called Safaris in order to shoot almost any creature they wish, including elephants, lions, leopards, rhinos and buffalos, and all for kicks.

Some cruelty to animals is well-documented.  An example is the lifelong confinement of black bears for their bile in China and other Asian countries.  They are confined for up to thirty years in cages in which they are unable to stand or turn around, and often have had their claws and some teeth ripped out without anesthetic.  They have tubes inserted into their gallbladders by various means, and are milked of their bile twice a day for so-called medicine. 

Another is the killing of animals with appalling cruelty for religious reasons.  This has even been legalised in Australia, and generally involves slitting the creatures’ throats and letting them bleed slowly to death in pain and terror. How anyone with half a brain could imagine this as being pleasing to our Maker escapes me.

When you pass the chicken shop in the shopping mall, the counter is stacked with their breasts and drumsticks. It is as if the pieces have been manufactured on an assembly line (which is correct) from unfeeling and brainless creatures.  One only has to own a bird to know that they are extremely intelligent and feel love, loneliness, terror, and pain.  Each one is an individual.

My dearly missed pet was a little bird who controlled my life, a peach-faced cockatiel named Zaki who left me for Rainbow Bridge a few years ago at 18 years of age.

She used to sit either on my shoulder or on the heater as I wrote.

She spent most of her waking hours with me.

Mrs Flysa used to say “You love Zaki more than me”. I would respond “Well.......!!!!”.

Zaki would accompany me on most outside excursions and was well-known at the local supermarket and service station. She is buried in a beautiful, secluded spot in the garden, and I place a flower on her grave every day. I have expressed the wish that some of my ashes be interred with Zaki.