Canary Knits: Grieving a Pet

I'm generally not keen on sharing personal or sad news online, but I currently have a very sick canary.

My experience with these creatures leads me to believe he'll die sometime quite soon, though he is scheduled to see the vet.

This crappy situation has recalled in my mind previous pet bird deaths, and I'm going to tell you a story about one.A person I know, likely not meaning to do harm or be viscous, once responded to "my canary's just died and we're very sad about it", with "well, it's just a bird".
I suppose comparatively one could say it's easier to bond with a dog or cat. But grieving over a pet seems to have an awful lot more to do with the human than the animal.

I'm not on some campaign to end flippancy to unconventional pet owners' grief and love for their animals; just ruminating on how people decide to draw the line, culturally, on
1) what animals are acceptable "pets"
2) what animals are high-level "companions"
2) what animals are low-level "furniture", and don't require or induce dear feelings from their owners

Another one of my favourite stories:
I was at the vet, in the waiting room. Just arrived, holding my bird's cage. A woman with a cat in her arms comes right up to me. She coos to her cat "look kitty, lunch!"
I kid you not, folks.

Of course, the bird's already in a high-stress situation. They're easily stressed animals. Putting a predator right in its face is not going to help. At least, it's not going to help the bird, but I suppose the bird doesn't matter.

End rant masquerading as rumination.

If anyone's interested, I'll keep you updated on my poor little guy's progress. It's Hilts, by the way. He's made more than one appearance on the blog.

Source: http://www.canaryknits.com/2012/08/grieving-pet.html

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