Mr. T (Rex)

Thank you to my Discord for giving me this idea, a funny thing that happened in my early teen years.

Everyone wants a pet. Lots of people have pets. Whether it’s a fish, a frog, bird or dog, maybe a ferret or two. Not me though. I wasn’t allowed to have any sort of pet for the longest time no matter the arguments I gave my parents. They didn’t want to hear about how a pet was good for helping stave boredom by keeping me busy while at the house, they didn’t want to listen to the videos I found explaining the benefits of owning a pet, and they even didn’t seem to be swayed by the idea that a pet could help with house security (we did have a big house, and my parents did like the ideas of security measures so I thought it would be a win)- in fact, all they seemed to care about was that it would cost money for shots and be an extra mouth to feed. Eventually I started to lose hope that I’d ever have a pet. It was sort of a surprise when they did bring one home eventually.

To be honest, it was a bit of a shock at first- not only because of my parent’s aversion to wanting to own one when I brought it up, but also because it was a pretty large one and would be a bit of a problem to handle at first I had thought. They countered that in the long run it would help with security, and we would just have to be strict with it. Logic I had given them earlier, but oh well there wasn’t much use pointing that out I guess so I happily accepted the new addition to the family.

His name was Mister T, like the guy in the A-Team TV show, but he also responded to Rex and boy was he clumsy. He’d go to dig at something on the ground and accidentally pull up bushes and we’d have to spend a lot of time replanting them and reprimanding Mister T about the whole thing. He’d sort of lumber off, swaying left and right in his peculiar stride, and his tail would accidentally leave dents in the side of my parent’s vehicles, which obviously were expensive to repair. In the span of a few months he had done quite the number to the repair bill of the house and cars we owned, and my parents weren’t too happy. They started calling around to see about shelters for Mister T, but soon found most of them were either kill shelters or claimed they were booked to capacity. Kill shelters wouldn’t do since we had grown close to him, we wanted to give him a good home. So we made posts online and started advertising in the local newspaper about Mister T needing a new place to live. That’s when he finally proved he could actually help with security- and boy was it a sight!

My house is in not the best of neighborhoods, and as such sometimes they would see people looking like they were casing houses for burglaries. Most of the time nothing came of it, but on one fateful night a group of thugs hopped the back fence to get to the rear of our house. We had built the fence super high to help keep in Mister T, since he had been growing quite a bit and we didn’t want to risk him getting out, and it also meant the intruders couldn’t see him until it was too late. From the statements they gave the police they had figured that with such high fences we must have had something valuable, so they were gonna drop in and take whatever it was. Mister T, however, chased them up the tall oak- the only tree that has survived his tantrums he can pull sometimes- and he waited there, keeping them up at the top until we came home. To be honest it took a bit of work to get him to give up his hunt, but he gave in when we pulled out ice cream, which seemed to be his favorite treat. After the whole thing was over the intruders were taken to jail, we had to clean up the backyard for the millionth time, and the police told us that we had to find somewhere else to keep Mister T to live, citing some pet law I guess we didn’t know about.

In the end, he was taken to an island to, as far as I know, live a wonderful life in a jungle- kind of close to his natural habitat as far as we can tell. I haven’t seen Mister T Rex in years, but every now and again I do fondly remember the time my parents thought a dinosaur would be a good pet for our house and neighborhood.