Of the accompanying photo, please focus on the dog and not the 'ahem'.
This is the only picture I have of me and a pet growing up. He was not actually our pet but some mongrel my mom had adopted and reared in the yard. Like all the dogs we were kind to, he was called Lucky. We were living in Jalan Sayang then (near present-day Kembangan MRT station).
My mom has always believed that it is a good thing when an animal seeks shelter at your home, and that we should do our best to look after it. And it is not just an occasion to buy 4-D for the luck that the animal would bring.
You can learn many things from a parent and kindness to creatures is just one of them. With my mom, I've known for a long time that she has a knack with animals. They seem to respond to her well, like this cat who would climb six stories up just to lay on a seat outside her home. Oh, I know this cat wants to get in and be pampered like the rest, but cats are jealous and selfish with their own kind like that.
When I was six or seven, my mom bought us kids a rabbit from that lady in Chinatown who liked to skin snakes and shell turtles. I was glad that the rabbit escaped from her clutches. I also learnt the difference between a rabbit and a hare then, and that it was a hare that we bought. She was brown and grey and lived to a ripe old age. Some of the things she enjoyed was black coffee and bread.
The first thing my mom did when we brought that hare back was to teach it to use the kitchen gutter hole as a toilet. I was amazed that she succeeded. Nobody had ever heard of a toilet-trained hare before and it was a fact that I was proud to share with my school mates so they knew it was possible too. That episode opened up my imagination to all kinds of animal training. I even tried to train a dragonfly on a string once but it only served to remind me that certain creatures preferred to stay free. Oh, we were certainly tempted each time an injured sparrow fell on our staircase, but each time, our mom would remind us that sparrows would rather die than be kept in a cage. And so we would nurse it in an open shoebox, hoping it would not bite its tongue and die. I guess it is the same with us kids. Back then, we would rather run about in the backlanes of Geylang than be cooped up in the house.
But at the end of the day, like that mongrel, we certainly appreciated going back home for a warm meal and some loving attention. Home is where the heart is and kids and animals know it best.
Related story:
http://growing-up-in-geylang.blogspot.com/2011/08/kuching-time.html
