Another way to move your pet, of course, is to take it with you in the car. The problem here is that mOst motels don’t allow animals. I know of one couple who once got a dog into a motel by claiming it was a Seeing Eye dog, which they established via the clever ruse of having the husband wear dark glasses, only the dog didn’t really hold up its end of the bargain. Instead of acting like a trained professional, being alert, looking out for obstacles, and so forth, it was dragging its owner along like a motorboat towing a reluctant water-skier, stopping only to sniff people’s crotches and snork up low-lying cocktail peanuts. Another problem with the Seeing Eye ruse is that it won’t work if your pet is a snake, for example, or a cat. There are no Seeing Eye cats, of course, because the sole function of cats, in the Great Chain of Life, is to cause harm to human beings. The instant a cat figured out that the blind person would follow it wherever it went, it would lead this person directly into whirling unshielded manufacturing equipment.

I once, as a favor to my sister, transported her cat in my car about ninety miles to her new apartment. Naturally it turned out that the only place in the entire car that the cat wanted to be was directly under the brake pedal, which meant that if I needed to slow down, I had to reach down there and grab the cat without looking—an activity comparable to groping around for a moray eel in a dark underwater cave filled with barbed wire—and then I’d hurl the cat, still clinging to pieces of my flesh, into the backseat, and then I’d hit the brakes, and then the cat would scuttle back under the pedal. As you can imagine, this cat and I were the best of friends by the time we arrived at my sister’s apartment, and I only hope that I see it again someday when my hand has healed to the point where I can aim a dart gun.