The joys of damp noses and furry feet

This column was originally published in the News & Record on August 8, 2007

Friends of mine once paid to board a stray dog because they couldn’t bear to leave it on the side of the road. Their house, you see, was already filled with five dogs of their own and the rescue shelters were similarly packed to the gills. That’s true animal lovers for you.

Me, I’m an animal parent, which is slightly different. Though I will make a U-turn to help a turtle across the street, most of my animal efforts go to the two dogs and two cats in my home. Despite the heartstring pulling of unavoidable adoption fairs and shelter ads, four is the maximum capacity of our pet population. Not coincidentally, four is also the minimum capacity.

We learned our lesson when we first introduced our pets, at that point my husband’s cats and my one dog, Emmie. While the cats were staging peaceful protests against the canine monstrosity invading their space, Emmie was desperately trying to befriend them. Just a week after we returned from our honeymoon, we took Emmie to an adoption fair and let her choose a new playmate. Curled in a corner, warding off the chaos through detachment, was a little tan mixed-breed. Emmie gave a long, approving sniff, so we took him home and named him Cosmo after the flaky but sweet character on the kids’ show, The Fairly Oddparents.

Emmie and Cosmo now have a strange but working relationship that seems to be a hodgepodge of mother/child, sister/brother and best friends. Emmie has even taken a move from the cats’ playbook and licks Cosmos’ face and ears clean daily.

It has been three and a half years since we brought Cosmo home, and the cats have nearly acclimated to their interspecies family. The four have certainly defined some parameters for cohabiting. For example, our adorably fat cat, Nikita, always gets the right of way, even when it comes to Emmie, who is easily five times her size. Our eternally kitten-like cat, Scully, has trained the dogs to chase her, though I suspect they would find themselves meeting the business end of her claws should the chase become capture.

Increasingly, though, we find all combinations of dogs and cats lounging in close proximity or even sharing a friendly sniff. It is those moments, and the times that Emmie’s big eyes or Scully’s “meep” of a meow instantly relieve my workday stress, that it seems obvious that research would find that simply caring for pets can improve the overall health, even increase the life span, of their owners. Not even clawed furniture or dog-ravaged yards skew the results of those experiments.

Of course, like most pet owners, we were not thinking about longevity or the average span of a common cold when we pulled into the parking lot of the shelter. Instead, it is the simple pleasures of pet ownership that spur us on: The sound of Scully’s claws on the carpet as she races around during her 11 p.m. energy burst; the unabashed joy Cosmo and Emmie display after a weekend apart from us; the way Nikita sometimes shows displeasure by following us from room to room so that she can sit with her back to us.

So though I may take some teasing from those who find it ludicrous that I speak to my pets as though they understand not only English, but also complex concepts like polite behavior, I can no longer imagine a home that lacks the sound of 16 padded feet and the occasional thud of Nikita’s grace-challenged leaps.