Become your own pet

Become your own pet

Dear Dr K,

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted a pet dog to play with and to keep me company.

My parents absolutely refuse to have a dog living under their roof, and they say that I am free to get how many ever dogs, cats, elephants and monkeys I want when I move into a house of my own.

However, I don’t want to wait that long, and they also mentioned that if I decide to have pets when I live on my own, they won’t come to visit me.

This makes me very sad. How can I convince them to change their mind about pets?

Timmy Moti

Dear Timmy,

You are in an unfortunate situation indeed. I can empathise, as I too found myself in such a situation when I was a young dog-loving lad. If only I had known then what I do now, I may have been able to convince my parents to let me have a dog in the house. I presume you have already tried the conventional methods of negotiating with parents: namely, reasoning, bargaining, pleading, and then throwing a tantrum, in that order. Seasoned and well-trained parents are rarely swayed by these methods, so you will need to employ more advanced tactics in order to make any sort of impact on their cold, pet-hating hearts.

The strategy I am about to offer you is fairly simple conceptually, but will require some perseverance on your part to be executed successfully. It may be very tempting at times to give up altogether, and your parents will try all kinds of things to get you to stop it, but if having a pet is your ultimate goal, you should settle for nothing short of that.

You should know that this strategy will work for most kinds of pet, although with some kinds of animal (fish, for example), it may be very hard to pull off.

The stratagem employs the philosophy espoused by Mahatma Gandhi, that you must be the change you want to see in the world. In this case, the change you want to see is a new pet in your house. Therefore, you must be the new pet.

So get on all fours and start barking. Urinate on the furniture if your parents don’t take you out for a walk. Run around on all fours like a hyperactive mutt, and then lie around listlessly the rest of the day. Chase stray cats if you see any, and bark at strangers who come to your door. In short, behave like a dog as truly as you can.

Initially this will just annoy and fluster your parents, and eventually they will lose their patience with your antics and get very angry with you.

This is where your plan is most likely to fail, as you might give in to the threats that they will inevitably make at this point. You must soldier on and continue to behave like an animal.

In time, your parents’ anger will dissipate and go in one of two directions — either they will become so frustrated with your behaviour that they finally cave in and agree to get you a dog, or they begin to grow fond of you as a dog.

If the first situation occurs, all is well, but in the event of the latter, you need to break the act and resume normal human behaviour. Your parents will miss having you as a dog so much that they will soon choose to replace you with a real dog of their own volition.

Yours questionably,

Dr K

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