When lockdowns ended I was left holding the kitten and the kitty litter \u2013 but now we\u2019re like an old married couple<\/p>\n
After years of indoctrination from my native-animal loving parents, I arrived at adulthood wary of domestic pets. We didn\u2019t have any when I was growing up. Instead, Mum would jokingly tell us to go outside and play with the skinks that sun-baked on the hot bricks, or with the echidna that waddled through the garden. The native animals were not so keen on this, so I began collecting dead spiders and storing them in an old jewellery box, their limbs slowly disintegrating over time until they were nothing more than dust.<\/p>\n
When I left home, we bought goldfish for our sharehouse, naming them after musicians we loved. Madonna was a quick-darting thing and Cyndi had bright-orange scales. They were low-maintenance pets, requiring nothing more than a pinch of food each morning and the occasional top-up of water. Even I could manage that.<\/p>\n
Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When lockdowns ended I was left holding the kitten and the kitty litter \u2013 but now we\u2019re like an old married couple After years of indoctrination from my native-animal loving parents, I arrived at adulthood wary of domestic pets. We didn\u2019t have any when I was growing up. Instead, Mum would jokingly tell us to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}