Guide To Pets

Okay, let’s run it down page by page:

Cover

Normal cover page. Nothing more to say about this one

Cats

Alternate version of the last joke: a side-by-side comparing an archetypical ‘crazy cat lady’(hugging and kissing several felines to a ‘mentally stable alone guy’ standing in a dark room doing the Blair Witch pose. 

The joke that ended up being used at the very end actually happened on a hinge date, almost verbatim, with the red-flag pieces clicking together as I heard the words leaving my mouth. I am a changed man. Every incel should be forced to keep and raise a kitten to adulthood, both as a lesson in empathy, and as a canary-in-the-coalmine for potential suitors.

Dogs

Cmon, man. What the fuck is a ‘Cane Corso’. No more killtronic hounds, PLEASE!. The gendered thing has some unironic truth to it, of course; you simply don’t see male pet owners doing Munchausen By Proxy to their half-dozen felines, (most dudes don’t even exceed 2 cats, max) nor do you see women going nutty over those grotesque ‘2x pimpy’ affronts-to-nature.

Dobermans… they do look like Kazuya Mishima.

Reptiles and Amphibians

BZZZT!  Not for domestication, sorry. Throw that fucking pimple into the woods and get some sea monkeys pal. That thing doesn’t even know what the fuck is going. It would eat your face it had the chance, and probably deserves a life larger than 1.5 square feet. 

Fish

I spent so god damn long on that drawing of Drake and it still looks bad. Still, I think I nailed the psychological profile here. “That one… heh… is called the Clarion Angelfish. One of the prettiest fish in the ocean... not as pretty as you, of course.” (simultaneous moan and lip bite) Meanwhile, Pharrel’s weird as art school web autism has him memorizing all this shit just for the love of the game. 

Hamsters and Guinea Pigs

To fill in some gaps on the hamster backstory: the man who actually went out an procured the hamsters was a man named Israel Aharoni, a Jewish zoologist and linguist living in British-occupied Palestine who took it upon himself to reconstruct Hebrew names for the countless endemic species of the region, which may have been lost to time in the some 2000 years since the language had ceased  being spoken. He seems, frankly, like an incredibly charming character. Which makes it all the funnier that his lab partner at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem was secretly smuggling weapons for the proto-IDF. 

They eat Guinea pigs in south america, but whatever. I couldn’t find a lot of info on the farming practices but they seem, by all accounts, to be on the whole way better than what the average farm animal probably experiences in the states. Glass houses, etc. At least they have the guts down there to acknowledge that their staple livestock has an identity outside of being meat. Up here, we basically just cover our eyes with our hands and keep it moving. 

Horses

I heard “Come Out You Black And Tans” for the first time the other day, and the song is such a banger that it overwhelmed me with cultural-pride-by-proxy (We’re mostly Nebraskan Swedes, I recently came to learn, unfortunately) that I immediately linked it in my friend-group discord with the tagline “Irish=best whites” to mixed reactions. Oh well. Your loss. What was I talking about again?