Guest Writer Wendy McTavish

A short excerpt from:
EXPAT – Opinionated memories of forty years in Hong Kong

Suburban Psycho

Flush with the image of myself as an emerging earth mother I decided to go the whole hog and get a cat and a dog. The cat we adopted from a litter down the road. I asked Robbie to name her and he chose the extraordinary name of Wilma.

‘Wilma? Why Wilma?’

‘The dog next door is called Fred so now we have Fred and Wilma Flintstone!’

Encouraged by my aunt we purchased one of these dogs. A fat white and ugly-beautiful puppy she was christened Miss Piggy for the obvious reason. Miss Piggy turned out to be extremely stupid and also most promiscuous. No clothes hanging on the line were safe from her predations. No male dog could resist her canine charms.

At great expense we erected a fence around our property to keep her inside. Bull terriers are unable to jump high because of their sturdy front quarters. However, we forgot that the neighbourhood mongrels did not have the same disability. They could jump in and they did. Miss Piggy and I went to the local vet for an ante-natal visit. However, the vet told me something of which I’d not been previously aware. If bitches are aborted they cannot give birth another day as we humans can. Not wanting to deprive Miss Piggy of the joys of motherhood and being reluctant to deprive my children of witnessing the mystery of birth, I decided that my teenage, unmarried dog should proceed with her pregnancy.

What a mistake! Miss Piggy gave birth to her first puppy at about 8 AM one school morning. After watching three puppies come into the world my children regarded it all as a bit ‘ho hum’ and wandered off to school. Miss Piggy’s twelfth puppy saw the light of day at 5 PM, after nine hours of labour. I was exhausted but not as much as ‘Miss Piggy’.

The puppies were cute and obviously had several fathers. (This is another fact of nature of which I’d been ignorant. A bitch can carry the pups of many different fathers at once.) Twelve puppies were far too many for such a young mother. Over the next weeks I would arise each morning to find a dead puppy lying beside Miss Piggy. I could not understand it as they all looked extremely healthy.

One day the mystery was solved. I put them in the back garden to gambol with their mother and went inside only to emerge hurriedly when I heard a terrible squealing. I was confronted with the sight of Miss Piggy’s big paw grinding her offspring’s face into the earth, trying to suffocate it. I guess it was an understandable reaction to a multiple birth of such proportions plus severe mastitis.

One by one little puppies were buried about the garden. When Miss Piggy started digging them up and eating them we decided that we could never feel the same way about her again and found new homes for her and her remaining few offspring.

Author Wendy McTavish

Wendy McTavish