Barking Up an Electronic Tree

Friday, November 18, 2005

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Barking Up an Electronic Tree

By J’AMY PACHECO

In his classic novel “Peter Pan,” James M. Barrie declared when the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and each became a fairy.

Barrie didn’t mention what happened next, but I’d bet money it was this — when the first baby learned how to speak real words, it asked its parents for a pet.

There is, I am certain, some unidentified gene that makes children long for a pet. It has to be a primal urge that drives a child to beg, plead and whine for a warm and furry creature that their parents know will chew shoes and urinate on the carpets.

Long before we became parents, my husband and I adopted an adult dog. We did this because we learned the Shih Tzu was soon to be homeless, and would likely be put to sleep. “Scotty” became a beloved member of our family, but when he died, we considered our pet-owning days over.

When our daughter was an infant, we took in a German Shepherd who had been living in a relative’s condominium and who needed a larger yard in which to live out her final years. “Maxie” was an enormous dog with a thundering bark, who watched over our daughter as she grew into a toddler, and who patiently allowed her to yank on her ears. Maxie died when our daughter was barely three, but she mourns the dog as if it happened yesterday.

Our daughter, now nine, has never stopped asking for a pet. Hoping to retain the spontaneity allowed in our lives by remaining pet-free, we declined her requests — but did allow her to keep a goldfish that she won at the county fair.

That goldfish needed friends, and we soon had an aquarium filled with golden gills. For variety, we also bought crabs, which insisted upon living out-of-sight in the filter, and which sometimes escaped the aquarium altogether. Yikes.

But the fish and crabs couldn’t be cuddled, and our daughter begged for a puppy. On a trip to Disneyland, we spotted the next best thing — a silver Pluto dog operated by remote control. The dog could walk, bark, and pant, so we bought it.

She loved her phony dog, but wasn’t fooled for a moment.

My sister-in-law bought a furry puppy that yipped realistically and could execute an impressive back flip. Unfortunately, its hard plastic battery compartment made it an uncomfortable snuggle toy, and into the closet it soon went.

So our daughter continued to beg for a real dog, and we continued to insist that owning a pet is too much responsibility for spontaneous, irresponsible people like us. We’ve had to flush a lot of fish, you know.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that neither my husband nor I had pets of our own. When I was a child, my family had dogs, but they were never “mine.” We also had horses, pigs, cows, chickens, geese and an occasional goat, so animals just weren’t that exciting around our house.

It’s not that I don’t like animals. My parents have a dog, and I enjoy rubbing his fat little tummy and playing with him. But not enough to want to bring him home forever.

So when a toy manufacturer recently came out with an electronic game called “Nintendogs,” my pet-deprived offspring immediately begged for one.

Perhaps he had some unspoken longing for a dog as well, for my husband one day broke his long-running ban on video games and came home with a pink-cased Nintendogs set.

Our daughter is now the proud owner of three dogs — a German Shepherd named Maxie, a Shih Tzu named Scotty, and some kind of yellow dog named Goldie. They reside in her beautifully furnished apartment with its hardwood floors and stunning city view — all contained inside a case small enough to hide in my purse.

Her pooches regularly enter dog shows, where they compete in a variety of events from Frisbee catching to obstacle jumping. Each morning, my daughter gets up and “bathes” her electronic dogs. She walks them and feeds them before shutting off the game to go to school.

She uses a plastic stylus to pet them, and I have to admit, it’s pretty funny to see them roll over in puppy delight. Even I’ve been moved to pet the dogs, and I couldn’t help noticing they actually snap when you accidentally scratch their nose or tail.

Some people might think I’m a selfish mom, refusing to have a flesh-and-blood pet in the house. But we’ve got three dogs, our rugs are clean, you can walk barefoot on our backyard lawn, and nothing’s going to up and die on us.

And if we need something warm to snuggle — well, we’ve always got each other.