For thousands of years, humans have been domesticating animals. Besides the obvious reasons for domesticating animals, I believe that humans want to domesticate animals for other reasons. We want to have pets that are companions and love us unconditionally. Personally, I have loved pets my entire life. I was born into a family that already had a dog that was six years old at the time I was born. I was probably six or seven years old when my sister and I got our very own pet. My parents decided to get us a gerbil to feed our want for pets and maybe also teach us a little responsibility. The latter worked on my sister, but did not really work on me. I loved having pets, but did not really like the work that came with them. I refused to clean the gerbil’s cage and clean up its droppings. My family had a few pets, but we were not even close to my friend and his family. My parents always joked that their house was a small scale zoo. They kept many different animals for pets. They did not keep many that were exotic, which is a very debatable topic. I am not sure when humans became fascinated with owning bizarre pets, but it seems like it has been a long time. These days occasionally there are stories on the news of people having many different kinds of mishaps with their bizarre pets. I think that humans should not try to make any animal their pet. There are some animals that are well suited to become pets and some that just are not. We should know where to draw the line. Some animals belong in the wild or perhaps at a zoo, with well trained professionals. Some animals do make excellent pets and become a loving companion. We should just be careful which we choose for pets and which we choose to let be.
