Pet Lives

An average human lives around seven dog lives, four to six cat lives, over twenty gerbil lives but only three or four chinchilla lives, if our lone chinchilla who died at twenty is typical and you’re not raising them for the fur. We're slightly over the lifespan of wild African elephants but more than double that of their zoo born kin, roughly twice the life of an average dromedary, although I’ve never known an average dromedary, in between the mean for sperm and blue whales but only eighty percent that of Galápagos tortoises. Mind you elephants, dromedaries, whales and tortoises aren’t normally kept as pets. Neither are viruses, although technically speaking viruses may not be alive to start with. But nonetheless this novel coronavirus we humans have adopted could change the numbers for our species.