In Defense of Pets

I've come full circle regarding my 'why own a pet' stance. Firstly, I have always loved animals, all my life and ever since I can remember. I love all animals. I'm the person who rushes around after a rain saving worms on the ground. I'm the person who always says hello to a dog just as if they were a person because really (in my mind, they are). Yes, I refer to animals as people.

My first pet was a green and blue budgie by the name of choo-choo, I loved that bird. I've had several budgie pets in my youth. I'd never own a caged bird now, it's cruel. Choo-choo and his successors though didn't spend much time in their cage however, they were too busy flying about the house with my mother complaining of their pooing here there and everywhere. They spent a good deal of their life on my shoulder nibbling my ear.

I've had pet fish, grasshoppers (caught in 'grasshopper city'), a snake (that lived under house and bit my dog), dogs, cats, mice, yabbies, snails, a cockatoo named Beaker and more. Needless to say I loved Gerald Durrell's 'My family and other Animals' when I read it. If you love a good laugh and you love animals, read it. I felt a deep kinship with Gerrald.

I became a vegan, because an Angel guided me to do so and keeping animals as pets didn't seem like such a good idea. So I had a long stretch of life with no pets. When living in Melbourne I rescued a homeless cat that I called Gracie, who went on to to have five kittens a few months into our life together. Don't worry, I found friends to take on the kittens and give them all good homes.

I began to think, what's the point of keeping pets? As the documentary Earthlings  points out, feeding and caring for pets is not actually such an environmentally or ethically good move. Nonetheless, we have three goats, seven chooks, two dogs and two cats.

We live off the grid and a big aim of the game is to get our consumption needs from our property. We buy in feed for all the animals, for one reason or another and in various quantities. The chooks are the most self-sufficient and provide eggs for the dogs. We don't eat eggs ourselves.

It really doesn't go hand in hand with our life here, our off the grid life of work less and garden more life. Our buy in less and provide for ourselves more because let's face it, the animals are quite the freeloaders. But what if it is not about us?

Putting aside the fact that pets are most helpful in many ways (calm us, frustrate us, provide unconditional love, initiate exercise, alert us to the presence of strangers...) we are helpful to them too, beyond providing feed and board.

Pets who are with humans are there for a reason and that reason is that they are evolving with us. In fact, yes it's true, pets (like children) choose the person they live with because that person will have the life wtih them that best suits their needs for the evolution of their consciousness. Human beings have the highest and most complex energy frequencies in the animal world, when we are close to someone with a higher frequency it lifts our own frequency. Our consciousness experiences a lift. Guess what happens when we help to lift the consciousness of another? Our own consciousness lifts. It's a beautiful thing.

Having pets in our lives may begin as needing to have a friend, someone to love us... someone we can love. It may begin as a good deed on our part or the animals, but what is really happening is we are helping each other evolve, we are helping each other to wake up, to enlighten.