I've always wondered something. (Bare with me here, I'm going to verbal vomit some nonsense on you for a bit.) Well, I'm always wondering something; but this is a something I've been wondering for always. With me so far? Good.


I'm sure, you being the type of person who notices these things that you are, you've wondered this same thing at one point in your life. Probably when you hit 15 or 16 and hit the short-lived phase in which you decided cartoons were for babies. It probably dawned on you, one rainy Monday morning listening to some underpaid Math teacher with her hair pulled back to tight lecture on the importance of equal sided quadraparallellograms, that cartoons that have the main characters as talking animals (Arthur, anything by Richard Scarry, ect.) have pets.


What are these pets? I often wonder in sheer bordom induced fear. Are they slaves to the speaking animals? Did they cause some horrible scandle in a past decade that forced them to forever be plauged with the role of a pet's pet? Are they evolutionary throwbacks? Do they just not know any better? Are they a bit slow? Maybe they used to ride the short wheel during hamster school.


Why would someone give one set of animals the ability to talk, have well dressed families, drive apple cars - yet force another set to live as lowly pets? What did these pet's ever do to deseve this? Did they accidently pee on the hydrant when they were shopping for a new top hat, and the punishment is to be the new puppy for the ardvark family down the street?


I am baffled.


Worse yet, sometimes - and the sheer revolting horror of this keeps me awake on long winter nights cowering under my K-mart bedspread - sometimes the pigs in the Richard Scarry books eat pork.


No, No. It's just too much. I can't take it.