First of all I would like to welcome all of you here to Dead Pets and other sories about life. Everything I tell you is absolutely true and is accurate as my 30-something year old memory could possibly make it, excusing of course the standard embellishment one always feels necessary to add when telling a story. Over the years of my existence, my family, the Edgecombes have been through more pets than any one family deserves, or should be allowed. The one common factor in all of our pets is that they all died before their time of unnatural, sometime very unnatural deaths. Now we are not an evil family, and we never killed or let an animal die intentionally, they just have a way of dying around us, not others peoples pets, just ours. To help you I will first introduce my family: First we’ve got Michelle or Shelly, who is the youngest, then there is Joelle, who’s younger than me, but older than Michelle. That’s it for girls, next comes me, the infamous middle child, and then there’s Geoff, my older brother of two and a half years, not three, just a mere two and a half. And in charge, therefore most responsible for all damages, are Barb AKA mom and Mike AKA Dad AKA Champ AKA the Big Guy.
I have chosen to tell you about my dead pets in chronological order, and just to set your minds at ease, I presently own and operate 2 dogs and 2 cats, all in good health with every intention of staying alive and dying someday of completely natural causes…And before you grab your cell to hit the PETA speed dial button please trust that I am an animal lover who has never wished evil upon any animals…excluding my neighbours feral collection of cats that recently removed the eyebrows from my cat Jimmy…
It all started when I was about one or two years old with Inky. Inky was this little off white mutt. Kind of a mixture of , well I don’t know but he was about the size of young spaniel with a long tail for his size and kind of a pale miniature golden retriever look, but he definitely had no retriever in him. Now when I was this age Geoff liked to do one of two things with me, either make me laugh or make me cry. With Inky he could do both. You see Geoff had this little game he played that I now chose to call “make Inky insane”.
He would pick up Inky and put him on tables and then push him off…this was to make me laugh. I thought this was hilarious and he would just keep picking up Inky, putting him on top of what ever table he could reach and then push him off again and again. This of course pissed Inky off to know end but that never stopped us. I say us because it did not take long for me to learn by example. And when I couldn’t find a table short enough for me I would simply pick him up and drop him. You see, I just thought he was a toy. This really cool, fully operational toy, until…he went insane.
This is where the crying part comes in.
At one point Inky snapped from this continuous torture, and flipped. He was no longer going to take this, because due to his present lack of stability, he had now learned, he could fight back. First he would wait until we pushed him of, then he would come at us. Soon, we couldn’t even come close to him before he would start freaking out, and since Geoff was bigger and faster, guess who Inky had the most fun with. It was at this point that he was no longer a pet, or even a toy, but a totally psycho dog looking for payback. Needless to say, Inky was on his way to the big sleep as soon as Barb and Mike realized it was me or him, and don’t think this was an easy decision for them, but at least I had thumbs and in the early 70′s it was easier to lose the dog and just slap the stupid kids around until you knocked some sense into them…Did I mention my parents liked to drink?
