After living with my animal compainion/best 4 legged friend Devo for 5 years now, I’ve done some thinking. Devo is a very active little bugger with a pension for aggressively hunting and attacking food that is not his. He has a bowl of brown crunchy cat food pellets which is at his disposal at all times, with a bowl of fresh water by its side to boot.But is that good enough for Devo? No. Sunday night we made cookies (“made cookies” = removed premade dough loaded with hard to pronouce preservatives and chemicals from a tube-shaped plastic wrapper and eating 1/3 of the dough prior to baking it). As always, Devo felt inclined to help. By “helping”, I mean sitting by the cookie dough wrapper and licking it when I had my back turned. He also made a feverish attempt to steel one off of the sheet after I had taken them out of the oven to cool down. He also helped by attempting to slap a cookie out of my hand. Remember the game “Hungry Hungry Hippo”? Yeah, just like that. And did I mention he knocked the trash over to take one last stab at that cookie dough wrapper? That’s my boy.
Anyhoo, anyone who knows me well or has been reading these journal entries for any length of time knows of my ongoing battle with a people-food obsessed cat. He’s a quick little bastard – I was making chicken for dinner last night and only a second after my back was turned, he had hopped on the counter and was gnawing away on one of the pieces of chicken (don’t worry Kimb, I ate the one with Devo germs. Or did I?)
“That’s enough,” says I to myself as I locked him on the porch for a time out. “I’m trading him in for a sloth.” A pet sloth… yes! That would be very cool. I’d name him Doolie. Not after my old neighbor’s pug, but the crunchy little cracker tubes called “Doolies” from the late 80s/early 90s that looked like gears and were filled with “cheese”.. sort of like those filled pretzel tubes you see in gas stations these days called um... damn - what are those things called again?
I’m not sure if sloths would be decent companions in a domestic situation and it would probably be illegal, but you hear about people harboring illegal “pet” tigers, alligators, monkeys, snakes, etc. and the owners usually end up getting killed or severely mamed by them. Not with an illegal pet sloth. If you think about it, they’re so damned slow it wouldn’t really matter. I read that they're so slow that it can take sloths up to 3 days to mate (that is awesome.. THREE DAYS. No further comments). I guess if I had a pet sloth it could in theory crawl on me when I was sleeping and maybe bite my nose off, but that’s nothing in comparison to what happened to Roy Horn.
I could make 3 pans of fried chicken, eat it, do the dishes, and the sloth would only be about halfway up to the countertop before it realized there's no chicken up there frying anymore. That might make the sloth mad after awhile, but it sure would kick ass. I know sloths are herbivores, but seeing that I have a cat that likes things cats don’t usually like (peas, tomatoes, asparagus), with my luck I’d end up with a sloth that had a fondness for meat.
Would I have to worry about my pet sloth running out the front door when I opened it? Doubt it. Would I have to worry about my pet sloth peeing on the bathroom rug or in the laundry basket? Doubt it. Would my pet sloth meow at all hours of the night? Butt in front of me at the bathroom sink to drink from it before I brushed my teeth? Nope. It would just sit there like… like a sloth.
Devo, you had better watch your back and start behaving. Otherwise I’m going to look into this pet sloth thing. It would be a lot less work for me to do simple things such as eating a bowl of cereal without fear of having you sneak up on me, dipping your paw in it, and knocking the spoon out of the bowl when you take your paw out to lick the milk off of it. And better yet, sloths come equipped with pouches in which I could store things like guitar picks and quarters for laundry. Very handy if I do say so myself.
If it’s too much trouble to get a sloth, maybe I’ll just start feeding Devo morphine to mellow him out and have a plastic surgeon affix a storage pouch onto his tummy. I sort of like the idea of having a pet that doubles as a pocket.
