Future Pets
What kind of creature might become a pet in 200 years time?
‘Planet of the Apes.’ One hell of a film with Charlton Heston yelling ‘Take your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape!’ And that ending! I well remember the shock it gave me when I first saw it.
Rod Serling — take a bow.
How did the apes become masters of the world?
Apparently, all the dogs and cats died out, so people took to adopting apes as pets.
The idea of a world without dogs and cats is pretty awful. How would we adapt if such a tragedy occurred?
Not sure about you, but an ape wouldn’t be my first choice of pet. Apes belong in the wild. I know some people have adopted chimpanzees in the past, but I think it’s unfair. They deserve to be in their natural habitat, not wearing a diaper and drinking tea.
Besides, they are social creatures needing their own species for company. So equally, I don’t think I’d deprive animals like giraffes, zebras, wildebeest and elephants of that special interaction with their own folk — unless I could keep a herd of them.
What about more solitary creatures?
A lion. Now there’s a pet and a half. But who, you might ask, would possibly keep a lion as a pet?
Two lads did. Back in 1969, John Rendall and Anthony Bourke bought a lion cub from a store called Harrods. How that cub came to be there, I don’t know, but these two chaps brought that cheeky little creature home, raised him, played with him and eventually released him into the wild in Africa.
Where after a year, when they returned to check on him, he rushed down the hill to greet them, literally hugging them in an ecstasy of reunion. (This video always brings tears to my eyes)
Truly, animals can teach us a lot about love.
But again, it wouldn’t be fair to deprive a creature of its natural habitat. So what sort of pets might we have?
I often wonder about bees. If you look at them in close-up, they’re really cute.
I once read a story in which someone had a giant bee for a pet — had it hovering along beside her on a lead.
Fancy that idea? Bees are insects and don’t have lungs. They can only breathe through holes called spiracles. This limits their size.
But now we have genetic engineering. Add a couple of adjunct lungs and we can grow a bee to the size of a small dog.
Would it still be able to fly? Good question. I guess we could engineer that too.
People in Japan already keep huge bugs as pets, so it’s not such a weird idea.
Could fruit be engineered to have some kind of sentience? A happy apple smiling at you from the fruit bowl? A grinning grapefruit? A beaming banana? Ah, but then you’d never eat fruit again.
A pet tree? Bonsai? Like a mini-Ent? Imagine it climbing out of its plant-pot, shuffling around on its little roots, sitting on your lap while you watch TV. Rather a sweet idea.
At one time, pet rocks were popular. Then there were virtual pets kept on computers or phones. And there are robotic versions. To me, none of these count. They’re not alive and that is surely a pre-requisite for a pet.
So if cats and dogs die out?
Who knows what might replace them? It all comes down to how we manipulate those pesky little gene sequences.
Ride on a giant toad, anyone?
