When we first arrived in Iraq, they sat us down in a small room and explained the rules to us (General Order #1, which is actually many orders, but whatever) One of the rules was "No Pets". To a casual observer, this makes a lot of sense. The animals here are disease-ridden, mangy, and wild. Keeping one as a pet would be unsanitary at best, dangerous at worst.
Well, then comes reality, which is that the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines here are homesick and some of them miss their pets. While I don't expect that one would find many pet dogs in the CHUs (containerized housing units), there does seem to be a lot of "adoptions" going on. The most visible offense concerns a small family of geese, including a small brood of goslings.
They're cute, they take your mind off of work/war/missing home. So, although it took me by surprise how often I saw people hand feeding the little disease factories, after a few weeks, I sympathized with the offenders.
Unfortunately, those cute little goslings have reached an adolescent stage (they grow up so quickly!) and are now ugly terrors, trained to chase after anything with two legs and deep pockets.
Oh, well... the distraction was nice while it lasted.
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