"HOMES" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

You (brightly): I'm sure the new owners would like to have this!
YOUR SPOUSE: That's your mother!

HOW TO MOVE A PET

My major experience with moving a pet was the time we moved our dog,
Earnest, from Pennsylvania to Florida via airplane. We took her to these
professional pet transporters, who told us that for $357.12, which is
approximately $357.12 more than we originally paid for Earnest, they would put
her on the airplane in a special cage, which we would get to keep. The reason
for this generosity became clear when I picked Earnest up at the Miami
airport. It had been a long flight, and since Earnest had had nothing to
read, she had passed the time by pooping, so you can imagine what the inside
of her cage looked and smelled like, on top of which, as soon as she saw me,
she went into the classic Dance of Lunatic Unrestrained Dog joy Upon Sighting
the Master, yelping and whirling like the agitator on an unbalanced washing
machine, creating a veritable poop tornado inside the cage, just dying to get
out and say hi.

In fact, this experience gave me an idea for a powerful and semi-humane
global strategic weapon, which would be called "The Earnest." The way it
would work is, we'd get some large and friendly dogs, such as Labrador
retrievers, and we'd keep them in cages for maybe a week, feeding them bulky
foods, then we'd parachute them into the Soviet Union. The cages would open
automatically on impact with the ground, and these lonely and highly aromatic
dogs would come bounding out, desperate to lavish affection all over the human
race, and that would be the end of Soviet civilization as we now know it. Of
course there is always the danger of escalation. The Russians might strike
back at us with, for example, St. Bernards. Maybe we'd better just forget it.

Another way to move your pet, of course, is to take it with you in the
car. The problem here is that mOst motels don't allow animals. I know of one
couple who once got a dog into a motel by claiming it was a Seeing Eye dog,
which they established via the clever ruse of having the husband wear dark
glasses, only the dog didn't really hold up its end of the bargain. Instead
of acting like a trained professional, being alert, looking out for obstacles,
and so forth, it was dragging its owner along like a motorboat towing a
reluctant water-skier, stopping only to sniff people's crotches and snork up
low-lying cocktail peanuts. Another problem with the Seeing Eye ruse is that
it won't work if your pet is a snake, for example, or a cat. There are no
Seeing Eye cats, of course, because the sole function of cats, in the Great
Chain of Life, is to cause harm to human beings. The instant a cat figured
out that the blind person would follow it wherever it went, it would lead this
person directly into whirling unshielded manufacturing equipment.

I once, as a favor to my sister, transported her cat in my car about
ninety miles to her new apartment. Naturally it turned out that the only
place in the entire car that the cat wanted to be was directly under the brake
pedal, which meant that if I needed to slow down, I had to reach down there
and grab the cat without looking--an activity comparable to groping around for