I never wanted a hamster. My eight-year-old daughter, Lily, on the other hand, had folders. Habitat drawings and wheel specifications – a case for ownership of such rigour it bowled me over. As a boy I’d had a hamster, Jerry, and remembered him as fine – but nothing more than that. So I went to a Cardiff pet shop on a cold January morning in 2021 with no plan whatsoever to fall in love. At the back of the enclosure was a scruffy one nobody else wanted. Skinny. A bit unkempt. When the staff member lifted him out, he yawned and looked at Lily as if he’d been expecting her. She named him Popcorn Sushi and took him home in a pink carrier. He turned out to be unlike any animal I’d been around – he was nonchalantly, effortlessly relaxed. He ground his teeth when he was happy. He’d lick our fingers when we petted him. He never once acted afraid of anything. ‘Every evening he’d settle at the same end of the sofa.’ Photograph: …

In July 2021, after a few beers on a summer evening, my flatmate, Lew, answered an internet ad. By 5pm the next day, we had a kitten. She was a swirl of tortie-and-white fluff, with a small pink snoot, and huge ears that made her look more bat than cat. We called her Mush, pronounced like “smush”. From the moment the result of our drunken decision arrived and hid behind the sofa in our south London flat, we were in love. Like many first-time parents in their 20s, Lew and I were fussy and overprotective. Neither of us had ever been responsible for a living creature before. When I held her tiny body against my chest, I felt anxious. Any little thing sent us running to the vet. A crusty eye. A single flea. Was she too small? Was she eating enough? “She’s in perfect physical condition,” the vet assured us during one of her many checkups. As a pandemic baby, Mush didn’t socialise much during her first year of life. She saw only me, …

I was around four years old when my parents bought me Crispin, my first pet. A handsome yellow canary, Crispin was bad-tempered and behaved like an alpha male. He would spend hours preening. I thought he was enchanting. A gentle female canary, Mariflor, arrived soon after. She became Crispin’s other half and the mother of their chicks, Maribel and Quintin. Having a canary family compensated for my lack of siblings and extended family. It gave me a sense of responsibility and filled my life with joy. Every day, I would let the canaries out of their cage and they were free to roam around the flat. Crispin’s favourite place was the globe in my bedroom. Standing imposingly, he regularly gave his opinion on global affairs by pooping on countries whose governments he disapproved of. At least that’s how it seemed to me as a child. It was the 1980s, the time of the cold war, and my parents, who were political exiles of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, had temporarily settled in Venezuela. My canaries’ …