#46 🐶 Creatures of HABITS 🐈‍⬛

In brief 🩲

• If you’re not really a pet person the road to becoming one can be tough.
• My wife Vic adores hot drinks but tends to lose them faster than she drinks them. I am the hot-drink support guy in our relationship.
• There’ll be no newsletter next week, but I’m leaving you all with a reading extravaganza to tide you over: Notes from a small house IV.

Pet person

Can you become a pet person? Or is it that you are either are a pet person or you’re not?

I’ve been grappling with this for a while now. For the sake of my family – each one of them pet people through and through – I have been trying to become a pet person. It’s not impossible. But I’m finding it a hard road.

It’s not that I don’t like animals. It’s that I value having personal space at least some of the time – yet dogs and cats want to enter your personal space as much as possible, putting us fundamentally at odds. I don’t find it as endearing as other pet owners to have a cat walk over my keyboard while I’m working, for example – but the cats don’t understand that. Sometimes I find it hard to concentrate when the dog sits down beside me and starts licking himself. Loudly. But he doesn’t understand why I’d find that irritating. As my ten-year-old son wisely points out to me: the animals want to be around you; that’s just what cats and dogs do.