A Good Dog: The Story of Orson, Who Changed My Life by Jon Katz

Author:Jon Katz [Katz, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pets, Anecdotes, Animal Behavior (Ethology), General, Dogs - Breeds - Working & Herding Dogs, Dogs - General, Behavior, New Jersey, Essays, Human-animal relationships, Dogs
ISBN: 9781400061891
Publisher: Villard
Published: 2007-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

Whenever I wasnt in school, I was up in my room with Sam and my fish. The lights above the tanks hummed and reflected off the colored gravel; the whole room had an eerie, underwater sort of glow. Lying in bed at night, I stared for hours at the rhythmic swimming, circling, and eating that marked the lives of fish. Each tank had its own design, its own little concrete and plaster community, complete with houses and castles, pirate ships and treasure chests. Id constructed elaborate ecosystems with fake coral reefs and real plants. Windmills turned, tiny divers raised and lowered their arms, dragons blew bubbles from their noses. Periodically I undertook massive cleanups, involving the transfer of fish, the draining of tanks, the scraping of glass and boiling of gravel. The pumps and filters needed constant maintenance. I liked knowing I could always reassemble everything afterward. Up in my room, my little kingdom grew. No caustic teachers, nasty kids, troubled siblings, quarreling parents. Fish lives are simple, revolving around one another and food. I saw the one-armed man two or three times a week, and he proved a ready and lucrative market for the scores of baby fish I was cranking out in my bedroom. And I needed constant infusions of cash. Riding public transit buses, clutching unstable plastic bags filled with fish-this method of transport had a high casualty rate. Life in my room wasnt simple, either. Lightbulbs blew out, filters filled with gunk, equipment malfunctioned. The floor was piled with fish magazines full of counsel about filtration systems, gravel, and food. Since fish do not live long, they had to be continually replaced. It was common to come home from school and find dead fish floating; I flushed them unceremoniously down the toilet. My toughest, and most lucrative, work was breeding Siamese fighting fish, those vivid fantailed fish, usually kept in tiny bowls, that puff up colorfully at the sight of one another. (I was also proud of having crossbred mollies with platys, something rarely achieved by amateurs.) Breeding the fighting fish-betas, they are properly called-is a laborious process. The male blows a bubble nest at the top of the tank, then fertilizes the eggs his mate lays and places each egg in a bubble. The parents have to be separated promptly before he can harm her, but separated without disturbing the fragile nest of bubbles, subject to disintegration at the slightest disturbance. It was a painstaking process for all involved, but the one-armed man paid top dollar for the babies. After a while, I didnt have to steal money for fish or equipment. As I monitored my pregnant fish, separating the newborns from predators, Sam lay at my feet for hours. I appreciated his companionship. I thought him immensely loyal-no one else ever wanted to enter this water world-but perhaps he had his own agenda. (When we moved to southern New Jersey a few years later, so that my father could take a new job, my parents gave Sam away.

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