1. Joy to the World. Bullfrogs are not usually classified as pets, but this one not only has a name, Jeremiah, but is deemed “a good friend.”

2. “Ben. “The Michael Jackson love-rat song. I once heard this played incessantly during a performance art piece by Lyle Ashton Harris during a Yale Conference entitled “Regarding Michael Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender and Secual Difference Center Stage.” Ben came back into my consciousness while reading the autobiography of Meredith Baxter Birney, who co-starred in the film for which Jackson’s tune was the theme song.

3. “Sometimes I Don’t Mind,: The Suicide Machines. Begins like a love song to a human—“Something in the way you walk… I watch you sleep… I buy you things sometimes…”—but the tip-off comes in the penultimate verse: “You won’t lay down, you’ll hardly sit, I give you a bath when you smell like shit…”

4. “Suppertime” from You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. The original Off Broadway razzle-dazzle version, not the Fosse-fussy Joe Cool revamp from the Broadway revival. There are several solid Snoopy-as-pet routines in the show, including Lucy’s insistence to Charlie Brown that Snoopy “only pretends to like you, because you feed him.”

5. “Eric the Half-a-Bee.” This early Monty Python bit is now over 40 years old, an astonishing half-life and an enduring philosophical inquiry into Bee-ing and nothingness.

Two songs I won’t include in this ongoing series because I’ve never liked them, but also because there are other reasons to exclude them: “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo,” which doesn’t really explain the dog’s relationship to the others; and “A Horse With No Name,” since it can’t be much of a pet if it hasn’t even been given a name.