Kittens in my home!

I love certain animals especially since I’ve had the privilege of being raised up with them as pets. Our family pets ranged from a Cat and a Monkey to Dogs, Chickens and finally Fishes – electric fish, catfish, goldfish, etc and yes all these pets had names. In my University days, a friend of mine, Jeme, was working on her final year optometry project which was about how effective the use of mushroom extracts were in curing cataracts. Her test subjects, three adorable cats which I named: Hopper, Stealth and Baby.

When she brought these kittens to my off campus apartment, my siblings and I fell in-love with them. I was particularly overjoyed because I felt our rat infestation issues would be solved. Since purchasing cat food is not an African thing, I decided to feed them with vegetable soup filled with pieces of smoked fish. For a while, it seemed like they enjoyed every morsel until a strange scent filled the air. We traced it and found our beloved kittens were stooling all over our apartment!

We tried to let them out but their ‘need to go’ was so frequent, we had to opt for getting them a sand filled kitty litter box. At the end of the day, Baby who had eaten the most had lost the most amount of weight. After that experience, I became a firm believer in the need for pets to have their own special kind of food packaged just for them. I know as a Nigerian, the concept of canned animal food is not popular because we believe they should eat what we eat. It’s important that we know that the pet foods are made with generic nutritional ingredients needed by your pet. If you really love your pet, you’ve got to do right by them because whatever affects them will invariably affect you.

Now that I’m married, my husband and I can’t agree on what pet to keep. He wants a cat, I want a dog but part of my reluctance to even come to an agreement on the subject comes from knowing that pets need a lot of special attention/care and can be pretty expensive to manage. If you are looking towards having a pet just know that you’ll have to feed them, bathe them, brush their teeth, immunize them, comb their hair/fur, take them for routine check-up at the vet’s when they're sick or having behavioural problems. if you must own pets, let your focus be on the benefits you’ll gain from having them healthy; which is a faithful companion. As for me, I look forward to having kittens in my home someday.