December Talking Meme: (belated) Day 14

[dolorosa_12]

umadoshi asked me to talk about my favourite animal or animals, and apologies for posting about this topic one day late. This is a bit of a difficult one for me, because I am really, really not an animal person at all. My mother is, likewise, not an animal person, so we never had pets growing up, and no one in my extended family had pets either. As a result, I never grew up with the idea that a pet was a normal and expected part of every family home. Ultimately, this was probably for the best, given how much I've moved around, as I get the impression that it's very complicated to emigrate with pets. Thankfully, Matthias comes from a similar family, and also is not an animal person, so we're on the same page there. It really would be a dealbreaker for me.

I quite enjoy watching David Attenborough nature documentaries, and love things like the Strange Animals Twitter feed (also the feeds devoted to beautifully coloured birds), so I guess I appreciate animals in the wild. I think if I have a favourite animal, it's probably birds, especially corvids, and Australian birds like lorikeets, rosellas, Australian magpies (terrifying in the spring, beautiful song all year round; there used to be a magpie that my grandfather would feed porridge oats every morning, and he would whistle at it and it would sing back at him), king parrots, galahs, ganggangs, lyrebirds, bowerbirds, black swans and so on. There are a lot of Australian birds. I do miss the sounds of Australian birds in the morning, even though we have wood pigeons in the trees around our complex and thus aren't exactly lacking for morning birdsong.

I suppose my attitude towards animals is probably summed up as follows: most of the time I don't give animals much thought, I have no interest in having pets, but I'm glad that they bring so much happiness to my friends who have them.

Comments

[frayadjacent]

Birds are one of the things I miss most about Australia. I even miss the wattlebirds waking me up at 4 AM in October! There is definitely no bird that sounds like that where I live now (the UK). And the flocks of lorikeets and corellas around Melbourne were something to behold.

[dolorosa_12]

Like you, I am now in the UK, and while there are birds around, it's not the same as waking up to the sound of Australian magpies, cockatoos, rosellas and lorikeets. At least I get to hear them whenever I go back to visit my family.

[umadoshi]

I get the impression that it's very complicated to emigrate with pets

That's my impression too. Sounds like a lot of paperwork and sometimes having the pet kept in quarantine for months. o_o

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, exactly. I've got friends who emigrated with dogs or cats, and it seemed a very stressful, complicated experience. Given it's hard enough to emigrate as a person, I think having pets in the mix would be unnecessarily difficult!