The Curse of the Baker Family Pets

I’ve long wondered if every family has such terrible luck with their pets. In the last several years I have brought up the topic with many of my friend and even complete strangers. My findings have brought me to conclude that indeed the pets owned by my family have been and still are at a much higher than average risk of experiencing an untimely and/or unusual demise.

Since I was a little boy my family has owned countless pets of a great variety. My family likes animals, and the fact that we lived in a jungle, on an island in the pacific, is largely the reason for their great diversity. As I recall, we have, over many years owned, five cats, three dogs (not including puppies we gave away), two wallabies, four guinea pigs, a half a dozen chickens, two dozen ducks, a cassowary, a cockatoo, a garden snake, and some sort of jungle possum. I didn’t count the many mice that lived cozily in our walls, because we didn’t particularly want them to survive, thought they seemed to flourish despite our many attempts to remove them.

Our first cat (though I’m not sure whether we ever actually owned it per se) ran away before we ever saw it. The cat was on its way into our village with our supply man. He was carrying the cat in a cage on the back of his motorbike. You might find this odd, but I assure you it was quite regular in our world. Anyways, our supply man was almost to our village when he stopped at an adjacent hamlet to talk to some of the people there. He was explaining to his audience that he had some very interesting cargo on the back of his bike and just as he was about to show them the cat he realized there was no longer a cat in the cage. The cat had managed to pry its way out of the flimsy cage and escape into the jungle. Escaping may not be a good word, because the cat probably didn’t survive long in the jungle on it own. I’m sure it became a tasty snack for one of the any number of the larger creators that roam the night.

We considered, when we heard the bad news, that this may be a bad omen for any pet we might own in the future, but we shrugged it off because we don’t believe in bad omens. Maybe we should have, we may have spared many animals lives if we had decided not to adopt another pet.

more to come...