Charming illustrations and stories. Thank you.

Very depressing to read such cruelty and sadness. Luckily, my dog is here munching happily on his breakfast cookie, and the cats are slurping theirs. No thank you for this rotten way to start a morning

Animals don't become pets just because you cage them. Cats and dogs have adapted to living with people. The rest have had their lives stolen from them. Please don't entrust animals to children.

I suppose none of the commenters have ever had an unfortunate childhood experience with a pet, or a sibling's pet. Come now, the rest of the internet is *full* of bouncy happy pet clickbait. Thank you for this collection.

After reading these strange tales of juvenile pethood accompanied by weird abstract art of each pet, I thought perhaps I had stumbled onto the beginnings of potential serial killers. Very little if any remorse was mentioned. And where were the parents during all of these incidents? Who lets a child walk to school with a cat under his arm? This article belongs in one of those tabloids like The Weekly World News or even The Onion.

As an animal lover and care giver, these pieces were almost all very upsetting. These people, as children, were not given any guidance whatsoever in their treatment of their animals. Where were their parents? I looked forward to reading this but found it so upsetting. Basically this is artists recalling the 'special creatures' that they killed with their negligence…I hope they learned from it and don't continue this treatment, or teach their children to treat animals like this. The one exception was Eustace…such a sweet memory. I would have thought the whole piece would be like that.

I had a yellow and green parakeet named Duffy when I was about 11 or 12. I would close the door to my bedroom and let him out of his cage to fly around. If I were doing homework at my desk, Duffy would fly over, perch on my eyeglasses and chirp away before hopping down to my school paper, taking bites out of it along the edges. My 7th grade teacher was not happy. Duffy would also love playing on the floor with a little weighted "schmoo" which he twirled around by pecking on its head and send it scooting across the room. He would run after it and step on its body, triumphant. He also loved running down my arm and bathing under the kitchen tap water. His favorite foods were pieces of apple and lettuce. He would fly over to my outstretched hand, sit on my finger and converse. When he died, he was buried in Ft. Tryon Park in Inwood, petrified we were going to get caught doing so. He was a great little companion for several years.

I love the pictures, and several of the stories made me laugh.

This column consistently displays a view of animals as play things and objects of fascination, but never subjects of lives that are distinct from humans. Perhaps the NYT could feature animal ethologists and discussions of animal sentience and intelligence. Animals are more than objects. And the ones in this particular feature were all treated horribly. Where is the NYT's responsibility, editorially, for putting that in context?

It's a pity that most people commenting here are so negative about these stories.
You do realise these are stories from childhood and I am certain these kids learned a good lesson from the demise of their pets and I am certain they were quite upset at the time. The fact that as adults they seem to recall such sad tales shows in itself the impact it had on them.
Decades ago there wasn't a lot of information out there on the do's and dont's with pets. Because of these occurrences/experiences/accidents of the past we now have a wealth of information on how to treat pets and we can pass that onto the children of now.
These stories are sad but this is also life.

These "stories" show how callously and cruelly we used to treat our animal companions. Let's hope that children today would tell stories full of compassion and caring since "pets" are generally now considered precious members of the family and thus treated much more humanely.

Beautifully done. These stories capture the complicated, sometimes bittersweet (and sometimes plain old sad) interactions between children and their pets...alas, our relationships with animals often end poorly for the animals. Thanks for letting the complexity in.

Takeaway lesson for me: Don't leave children alone with their pets, especially if you like the pet.

Such sad stories. Pets have different kinds of lives than we imagine they do. A feral cat can be brought home and adapted to its family and indoor environment, but can we really say it doesn't yearn for the forest, or the back alleys, or some other distant home?

Nice, but I wish each anecdote was a little bit longer and explained in more detail the circumstances surrounding the story. A single episode of Flipper just doesn't cut it.

"My childhood Pet that I Stupidly Tortured" should be the title.

"One day, wondering if he could fly, I tossed him off our balcony"

"When I was about 5 years old I took my cat, Heinrich, with me to kindergarten. I carried him in my arms on the way there, and left him to wait for me outside until school was over. When I came back he was gone."

One Saturday I decided to give Fluffy a “penthouse suite,” by placing his bedroom compartment at the very top of a long series of plastic tubes, and I watched him sleepily shuffle his way up to his nest....I woke I found his lifeless little body crumpled at the bottom of the tube.

The chameleon changing colors was the best part of this mostly unfortunate group of recollections. More happy pet stories, please.

To my beloved Peppy: We will meet again someday and then we can all play "chase around the house." Grandma will make your favorite meal and then you can hop in my bed for the night once again!

The number of animals in this collection that suffered needlessly due to innocence or ignorance is sad and rather shocking. Just magnify the number of stories by the general population, and it becomes alarming. We need to do better in our treatment of critters. Parents need to supervise. My own family was not immune to this problem. My sister found a salamander in the yard. Starved for a pet and fascinated by the animal, she kept it in a shallow dish of water. She decided to take it along during a car ride for a brief errand, and put the dish in the rear seat window space during the errand. The sun baked the poor creature through the window--he was hard as a rock when we returned to the car. A family tragedy it was--tears and recriminations flowed. And it was the end of any more "pets" for a very long time.

The art is only adequate, and, in most cases, the writing, while not exactly dreadful, reads like it was transcribed from a rather dull and stilted conversation. On top of that, most of the stories leave me cold. Ugh.

RIP Stiffie, the Siamese with the patience of Job. She wore my baby clothes with only the slightest protest, and endured my weekly attempts to teach her the alphabet with masterly forbearance. Of course, it was she who did the teaching, and her lessons of love have been seared in my heart.

This is the most bizarre collection of pet stories I have ever read. Basic empathy seems to be missing in almost every one.

Thank you for feeding my spirit with this pet food.

What a shame that most of these tales are negative memories.

Great illustrations, sorry so many authors had to pass their childhood traumas on to me!

Pretty grim stories, most of these.
I'm sorry I read them.

Charming.

I think this sentence "Animals can play a primal, even magical, role in the lives of children" should be changed to say "children and adults". My cats are/were the most magical creatures in my life. (I'm a man of late middle age.) They taught me so much about love, about myself, about respecting boundaries, about cherishing the moment, about appreciating beauty. And watching them do their thing is astonishing.