I understand now why my college apartment building didn’t allow pets (not that that stopped me from, kind of insanely, keeping rabbits). Our pets have damaged our house in a variety of totally unforeseen ways over the years. Now that we’re fixing up the house to try to sell it I’ve been particularly irritated about them.
The cats haven’t destroyed too much permanently (besides a couple of very nice rugs they ruined with pee and the wingback chairs I have to keep covered with ratty blankets so they don’t scratch them up further). Mostly, they have messed up the house by being too stupid to use the kitty door we installed to the closet where their litter box is, meaning we have to keep the closet door open all the time and we have a useless hole in the door.
The dogs haven’t been too bad, either (though they’ve dug many a hole under the fence and in my lily bed). They like to poke their heads through the screen door, and they have scratched up the paint on the outside of the door to the deck.
You’ll never believe what happened here. My rabbit, Inga (who now lives with my mom) jumped from the floor up onto the dryer to chew at the knob. My rabbit, Benny the Bunny, who had to move to a new home after being repeatedly attacked by Inga, for a while lived in the downstairs bathroom (to avoid Inga). He chewed up a bunch of the wood in there (second pic).
Now we come to the parrot, Alice, who is doing quite well in her new home of seven months. Mysteriously we still have a lot of her dust circulating around the house. And she chewed up all kinds of things: chairs, windowsills, tables, doors, TVs.
Then of course there’s all the dust, dirt, fur, vomit, poop, pee, bugs, and kitty litter we invite into our home with our pets. I complain, but it’s not so bad at night, everyone passed out around me, purring and farting up a storm, companionable and comfortable.
