Sutherland - Kicked, Bitten and Scratched

I have always considered myself an animal person, meaning I not only felt at ease with most things furred, feathered, scaled, even fanged, but moreover, I found them an endlessly compelling and integral part of the world. A life without this passion has always struck me as a lesser one, and I admit to being a hard judge of people who do not share my love for the animal kingdom. At worst, I consider them suspicious; at best, deeply flawed. Perhaps my love of animals, which I admit I consider a superior trait, is simply a by-product of my upbringing. Despite its standard white suburban backdrop, my childhood managed to stray from the stereotype, thanks to a fun-loving mother and the unruly woods that breached our trim backyard.

I grew up with the requisite cats and dogs, mostly strays. There was Curly, a handsome mutt with a wavy coat worthy of a Breck Girl. There was Tang, a low-to-the-ground terrier mix, who always ran in a diagonal line and whose sizable balls, which nearly dragged between his short legs, could not go unnoticed even by the most modest of dog lovers. We also had three ducks one summer that chased us while we played Wiffle ball and overfertilized our and our neighbors yards with their voluminous and slippery green dung. We temporarily housed turtles that lumbered along the road after rainstorms. One had three legs and dragged a corner of its shell in a way that broke our hearts. We kept it longer than the requisite week and fed it full of iceberg lettuce. One Easter we got a black-and-white bunny that somehow hopped around the house, despite our cat and dog, depositing neat piles of raisin-sized poops my mom vacuumed up. When the bunny became a good-sized rabbit and the poops grew plumper, we put it outside, assuming it would prefer to live in the great outdoors with other rabbits. Instead, the bunny stayed close to home, hopping among the shrubs in our front yard. Most nights, the rabbit would wait in the garage for my father to come home from work and scratch its long ears. When I was in high school we got a dove, Eleanor, who spent her days cooing to her image in a mirror, laying eggs in our hanging plants, and trying to land on our heads. There were also guppies and hamsters along the way, though we were put off by their maternal cannibalism. The sound of a mother hamster munching her baby with lip-smacking relish still rings in my ears.

Beyond our household and its menagerie, we found the animal kingdom thriving in our suburban neighborhood. Just a few houses down, an older girl I much admired kept pet chickens that ran loose, lending an incongruous country touch to the new suburb. A couple of streets over, a raucous family of nine kept baby raccoons. My sister, our friend Bunny, and I spent whole afternoons wading ankle-deep in a wide creek, turning rocks over, looking for crayfish. The few we managed to get our small hands onthey were fastwed collect in a pail, only to empty it back into the creeks shallow, clear waters before heading home for cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches. At night, we tossed pebbles into the dark sky, provoking bats to dive-bomb us as we threw ourselves flat on the grass. We hiked through local farm fields filled with cows without a second thought, until one chased us down a hill. We only escaped being stampeded by throwing ourselves over a fence; then we lay there windless and laughing. The marauding cow stood stolidly by on the other side of the fence staring at us, as if to make its point.

When I left home and took up apartment life, my love of animals was mostly expressed vicariously. None of the landlords allowed dogs. I am allergic to cats. I would never, ever get another hamster. Besides, my life was too peripatetic for pets. Urban animals were a touch too urban, such as the obese raccoon that each night climbed a fire escape on my building, begging for food from window to window. Squirrels ate a hole in the kitchen screen of one apartment and regularly slipped in while I was out, raiding my trash can or pilfering a muffin Id left on the counter and then, for some reason, retiring to my bathtub for their feast.

I was left to satisfy myself by petting any dog that came within arms length and watching all things nature on television. I dreamed of buying a house, not to have the house so much as to get a dog, to have a small yard where I could hang a bird feeder, and maybe even to find a snake or two in the grass. Finally, in the spring of 1999, having acquired a house and a bit of stability, my husband and I drove two hours down the coast of Maine to New Hampshire to the home of a haughty breeder of Australian shepherds. We were there to collect an eight-week-old female red tricolor. As we expected, we fell hard. After being sized up by the taciturn breeder and deemed worthyjust barelyof an Aussie, she lent us a puppy crate, and we loaded our furry charge into the backseat. On the drive home, the pup whimpered in her crate on the backseat as we debated names and unwittingly drove through the night to a new and much richer life.