London - The call came just before I went into a meeting abroad. Scout was gone. His short, furry life had been brought to an abrupt and messy end.
The circumstances of Scout’s passing made me wince so loudly I was forced to explain what had happened to Italian colleagues listening in, who winced too.
Poor Scout the guinea pig, he’d been eaten by a cockapoo.
One minute Gracie-in-the-middle, nine, was stroking him on the bed, the next he was being tossed in the air and swallowed by a small, excitable dog with a comedy name.
“There was crunching,” Gracie said to me over the phone as I listened to the sad tale, her little voice sounding so far away in another world.
I didn’t know what to say. Words of comfort were difficult to find in my time-poor, tangled, work-mode mind. I was at a loss as to how to deal with the death of a pet remotely. Especially a pet that wasn’t even ours. “At least he had a good life,” I said feebly to my daughter. “How would you know?” she replied crossly, “You never even met him.”
True, I didn’t know Scout (or his surviving sibling Muffin). Gracie was on a sleepover at her best friend’s house when she witnessed Scout’s gruesome final moments while I was away working in Milan. This kind of unpredictable incident frequently occurs when I am away (I think they call it Sod’s Law).
She seemed strangely calm about what had happened, and her friend’s oum said both the girls had recovered from the shock and were writing a poem for the funeral the following day.
I was glad I didn’t have time to go into exactly what they were going to bury, but did offer a few words that rhymed with Scout.
The guinea pig’s abrupt demise is one of the 10 metre-long list of reasons why I won’t let my four have a pet much smaller than a Shetland pony.
On the fun-versus-effort front, rodents don’t rate so well and they are mostly short-lived; I believe cats are evil (you don’t own them, they own you); and reptiles are more difficult to care for than newborn twins.
It’s not that I don’t like animals - we have a blind, diabetic Airedale, after all - but I grew up in a household full of them.
At one point during my childhood our pets included four hamsters, four guinea pigs, two rabbits, three dogs, tropical fish, two donkeys, Hetty the chicken and an ancient cat which, fortunately for the rodents and the fish, was deaf and blind.
Most of our animals were from rescue centres and, as a result, were a peculiarly dysfunctional bunch. As we lived in a bungalow I got to know this chaotic menagerie intimately.
So, you see, I am “done” with pets. I have experienced every form of pet idiosyncrasy you can imagine: a rabbit with a rare form of buck teeth (which had to visit an animal dentist every two months at great cost), an unwanted one-eyed pony that walked backwards whenever you tried to ride it, a rat that suffered with depression and the grumpiest cat in the universe, which used to attack my ankles every time I went to the loo in the night (it was like living with Inspector Clouseau’s sidekick Cato from the Pink Panther films).
My lack of tolerance comes from experience - pet pitfalls are many and they are just not worth the effort.
I can cope with one dog but hand me a golden-haired hamster and I see something that could go into a catatonic shock at any moment and be accidentally buried by its owners who naturally assumed that it was dead (this happened, it involved a hairdryer and it still haunts me late at night).
I don’t mind other people’s pets because I can hand them back (like other people’s children) but I am adamant that my children won’t have anything other than our dog Duke who, to be frank, is quite hard work anyway.
And if I have calculated it accurately he’ll pop his clogs just as my eldest girls hit their teenage years. It’ll be grieving on a par with the death of the People’s Princess, I suspect.
Still they lobby me daily (hourly at the weekend) for everything from a tortoise to a mouse, but I am steadfast in my refusal, as my mind replays a childhood that was like one long episode of Rolf Harris’s Animal Hospital.
The only time I wavered was when Mabel, two, put in her pet request. “I want a baby dragon,” she demanded forcefully.
Now that would come in handy. - Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle