My dog, Whoopy, has become a cat. No really, it’s true. A surfeit of rats in my parents’ bungalow kitchen, and Whoopy is having the time of her life hunting them. My mother has made no objections so far, though she did scream the house down when she discovered a dead rat on her bed. That, I thought was quite mean on her part. I mean, here she is getting free rat eradication. What’s the big deal with a couple of dead rats on the living room carpet or on the beds?
I am even willing to let that go, but I absolutely cannot condone her confusing my poor doggy. Dogs, as a rule, are not treated as dogs in our house. ‘Kukur boley ki manush noye’ (That’s Bengali, which roughly translated means ‘Just because they’re dogs does not mean they’re not humans.’) is a phrase often heard in my house.
Whoopy has gone through various stages of confusion. When she had first come to our house, she was barely five weeks old. Five-week old pups are not expected to be able to distinguish sexes, are they now? So, she is not to be blamed if she thought that Snoopy (who was a mature four-year old then) was her mother’s substitute. Snoopy’s bleeding balls spoke tales of her confusing them for her mother’s teats.
As she grew bigger, she went into severe depression when she first started barking. I am of the opinion that she had expected that she would talk like we did. It took her a long time to recover from that slump.
Her next phase came when she thought she was an earthworm. That was apparent from the several dug up pots in the house. Her biggest despair then was that she couldn’t live in the soil like the other earthworms did.
This stage was followed by two months of total chaos when delivered her pups. Her instinct told her that these funny things had come out from her body. It was then that she began to accept that she might actually be a dog.
Her dog phase was rather strange. She tried being a Poodle for sometime. She became a proper lap-dog, refusing to sit anywhere other than on someone’s lap. She got into tiffs with Alsatians at the vet’s. That is the time when she was delusional about her size, thinking that she was bigger than the Alsatians she barked at. (She’s a really small and scrawny Dachshund in reality.)
Last year my parents shifted to Raipur. Attached to their huge bungalow are large areas of gardens and excess land. Whoopy in Raipur went into this weird ‘I think I am a monkey’ phase. The phase had already been initiated in our previous house where she would jump up sofa back-rests and what-nots. In Raipur, she made several attempts to climb trees, but finally surrendered to living on land.
Now she thinks she’s a cat. And it’s all my mother’s fault.