Pet Death Syndrome

P.D.S.
Pet Death Syndrome


My neighbours in Vredehoek, Cape Town, often ask why I don’t have any pets, considering I love animals so much. Usually I just fob them off with a vague comment like “I’m still looking into it” - but the real reason is more involved and rather tragic. Here’s why I can never allow myself to take responsibility for anything more animate than a Basil plant.

It all began with …rabbits. As small boys, my brother and I were crazy about our Little Hannibal and Hanna, along with their (fast) growing family of tiny black, white and tan jumpers, all skittish ears and sniffle noses. For a while, all was well with the rabbits. We raised the nippers to hunt bugs in the cabbage patch and held pantomimes where Hannibal would be a pirate and Hanna a lady of the night in a Parisian brothel.

Then, well…our Greytown farm had lots of puff adders. Murderous animals.

Several rabbit deaths later, and after numerous late-night tearful sessions with mum, we convinced her to let us try again - with something more resilient than rabbits.

Target, the Siamese fighter, devoured his way through Emma, Buttercup and seven other goldfish before turning belly up from exhaustion. The fish were followed by short-lived silkworms (we fed them poison ivy by mistake),
a luckless experiment with bantams (they kept wandering next door to befriend the Rottweiller) and an ant farm (destroyed by civil war).

Then came Hammy. The tubbiest, warmest little hamster in the entire world. He used to put his tiny paws up on the bars of his cage and watch Knight Rider
or Riptide with us. Of course, given the fatality rate of our pets thus far, my brother and I were hesitant to get too close to this new addition. Every evening, we cleaned his cage in a business-like manner and stoically ignored his plaintive, non-stop squeaks to be let out, oh please, just for a moment.

As the months passed, we began to reconsider. Day after day those little gimlet eyes would fix on us wetly. Little paws would clutch the bars; nose would quiver. Where’s the harm, we thought? He’ll be O.K. in the garden.
So one evening, after much hemming and hawing, we lifted our furry friend from his cage and strode out into the back yard, where shone a glittering roof of stars and a moon so big you could lick it. I carefully nudged the wee fellow onto the lawn, and he nearly swooned at the sheer immensity of the outside world. Perhaps he remembered the free air in some dim primordial corner of his brain.

Let free, he scampered to and fro, hither and thither, and my brother and I kept close watch, over bottles of Fanta. I could feel the tension in my jaw, but doggone it, he deserved this. He had outlasted all of our previous pets by almost a year.

After an hour of happy contemplation, I said to my brother,
“Well, perhaps we should all call it a night just now?”
We looked over at Hammy, whose eyes shone with a small, wordless kind of love. He finally knew what lay beyond the bars. He scratched his ear and sniffled happily.

Then a great grey owl swooped down like a silent stealth bomber, snatched Hammy with incisor-like talons and bucked up and away into the inky dark, wings denting the air. Predator and prey vanished. The night held its breath, and then a single gray feather drifted to the lawn, like the mark of an assassin.

“Well” said my brother, “that’s it, really, isn’t it?
We’d better go and tell mother.”

Years on, and my brother has since moved to Dubai; we struggle to speak to each other normally. I never quite got over Hammy’s passing. It was the straw that broke everything. My life is more solitary than perhaps it might have been, in another, kinder universe. But thanks to my friends and my angel worker at the P.D.S. meetings (you guys know who you are!), perhaps one day I might.