Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one go to get a haircut for one’s dog, toys for one’s cat, a small jar of crickets for one’s iguana? Not the least interesting fauna to be found on the premises, though, are the store’s customers, all of whom seem, somehow, a touch odd, peculiar, funny, and sometimes even a touch furry. I include myself here, of course.
PetSmart is dog friendly—so far as I know the store may also be dragon friendly—which means that customers often bring their dogs in while shopping. Some of these dogs are standard breeds—poodles and labs, Dalmatians and Yorkies—but many are mixed breed, and some of an ugliness so astounding that one wonders how their owners could possibly love them. Yet, clearly, love them they do. This love is a testament to the kindness that resides in some human hearts.
I have seen owners of corgis who themselves have preternaturally short legs, owners of bulldogs whose faces seem to be mashed in, owners of poodles who themselves have prissy walks. The question this brings up is whether people come to resemble their dogs or instead instinctively choose dogs who resemble them? Like so many of the world’s fascinating questions, this one has no answer.
The acquisition of an animal can change one’s life. In a remarkable passage in My Father and Myself, J. R. Ackerley, a friend of E. M. Forster and in his day the editor of the BBC’s Listener, describes his years as a cruising homosexual with a taste for what the English called “rough trade.” As a result of these ventures, not infrequently, as Ackerley allows, at the close of an evening he would find himself duct-taped to a chair while one or another of these young men went through his drawers. Then, in his 40s, he acquired an Alsatian bitch hound, Queenie by name, and everything changed. “She offered me what I had never found in my sexual life,” Ackerley wrote, “constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion.” Post-Queenie, Ackerley’s cruising days were done.
At the PetSmart store I frequent, upon entering one sees, off to the right, a large room where four or five men and women are grooming dogs. Off to the left is an ample room where dogs are left for the day, or perhaps longer, there to romp in the company of other dogs. Who cleans up after them I do not know. An MBA is not required, and competition for the job, I should imagine, is not stiff. Sometimes on weekends one or another animal shelter will set up in the middle of the center aisle with five or six cats up for adoption.
The one service PetSmart doesn’t provide is veterinary medicine, which can be very, even wildly, expensive. On a book tour in Los Angeles some years ago, I was told by a woman escorting me that she had just paid fees of more than $6,000 for chemotherapy for her 12-year-old yorkiepoo. I had a friend who briefly worked for a veterinarian in Sea Island, Georgia. She described Mrs. Van den Heuvel coming in with Truffles, her Pomeranian, claiming the poor creature was sadly off his feed. “Not to worry,” the vet told her, “we’ll have Truffles’s appetite back in no time.” He then instructed my friend to make certain the dog went unfed for four full days, at the end of which time Truffles was ready to eat Mrs. Van den Heuvel’s Ferragamo shoes. What he charged for starving the dog my friend did not know; ample, she supposed.
I mentioned the oddity of the customers at PetSmart, but neglected to say that it is an oddity I find agreeable. This is the oddity of people whose love of animals entails their feeding and protecting them, sometimes at considerable expense, which not so much defies as exceeds rationality. Even the cashiers at the store seem out of the ordinary. When I pay for my usual order of a bag of kitty litter and a month’s worth of Wilderness dry cat food (Chicken Recipe), one or another of them asks if I want a bag. “No thanks,” I say, “I’ll eat it here,” which usually doesn’t evoke a smile.
“Nowadays we don’t think much of a man’s love for an animal, we laugh at people who are attached to cats,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his novel Cancer Ward. “But if we stop loving animals, aren’t we bound to stop loving humans too?” I have no doubt but that we are, which is why I find a trip to PetSmart refreshes the spirit.
