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Our current pair were put in our path by the Good God I am convinced. Especially our older one Bear: Husband and I made an impulse "just looking" trip to the shelter. It turned out to be weekend the fees were waived. Here was this adolescent lab mix playing up to Husband. Husband was never more than lukewarm to the idea of a dog - me & the 18-20ish kids were the ones who wanted one - yet Husband was the one who asked, "Should we get him?".So we called the kids. It's a truly surreal experience to have your 20 year old son ask if you've thought something through. Said son quickly became Bear's favorite human, and still is.
We had decided to get a second dog when we found Gilligan the ditzy border collie at an adoption day 2 years ago. He is a "tripod" (amputee) and super fast and agile, which is typical of tripods, the vet said. Gilly is the rare dog who is much more motivated by attention than food. He reminds me of a 50+ pound version of those cats that plop on top of you and demand to be petted. LOL
@torquinox Yes I too feel the paradox of loving the pets and being tired of the labor of love. Most deeply when they want out at 2am.
Yes. Glad to know I'm not the only one!
Well this thread has livened up the forums. Should we rename it "OT: Pets Anonymous"?
yep..the rest lingers. At least it got some folks talking for a bit
I love pets too, and I'm exhausted caring for them when they decide to fall sick taking turns, and I hate hate HATE it so much that I will always lose them eventually. Having baby animals every once in a while would maybe cure this feeling to some extent, but I just couldn't cope with having to find a new home for the young 'uns, and then worrying about them forever.
My family and I have been starting to turn more towards fostering wild animals lately, in cooperation with some organisations close to where we live. Currently, we're the proud hosts of three young hedgehogs sleeping away the winter days in an enclosure in our garden. We had two others in the summer which my wife fed until they were strong enough to be released. That was a sad but glorious day. I think this could be a good way to go for us, and maybe for others also who feel the pain too much. But the cuddling is kinda hard, with hedgehogs, obviously. Though the babies are really nosy and fearless and try to nibble your hand very affectionately
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My splotchy kitty sang a lot. He'd sing to the Yule tree, he'd sit at the top of the stairs and sing -- I think because he liked the way it echoed there down to the front landing, and then the bottom one (split-entry home). Funniest was when he'd hunt some bug or another that had gotten into the house... he'd sing to it before he'd kill it. I think he must've been in the opera in his last life. Dearly wish I had a video of any of it. I always meant to take one, and then would miss it and think "oh for sure next time"... until I ran out of "next time"s. :(
I can post more silly horse outfits if that helps.
Gallery Link
Helps a lot. thanks
The answer to "more silly horse outfits" is always a resounding YES :)
@tsroemi : You've taken an option I'm not sure we have the stamina for. Adopting/housing wild animals as they recover/grow up looks from the outside to be very hard work. I have always had concerns that you know the wild animal less well than with a pet, and so can't necessarily see when it's not as fit as it could be. However.. you may well be proving me wrong.
Thinking on the idea of recovery homing for wild animals.. our garden is about an acre (1/3 hectare) of wildlife garden, so we could do the same, and potentially do the release into the garden - there is a large amount of wildlife there despite the relentless rodent slaughter perpetrated by our Maine Coon. Ozzie seems to be able to catch up to 2 rodents a day in the garden and doesn't appear to reduce the numbers. A previous Maine Coon kitten we had caught 2 rabbits a day and singlehandedly nearly exterminated a local warren. That warren took 3 years to recover after he ran out in front of a car.
Regards,
Richard
Richard, you usually get a lot of help from local wildlife organisations, seeing that a) they don't want people to mess about with the animals in a clueless way of course, so they want to educate you first, and b) they really need more folks to engage with that kind of thing. So you're never on your own, and they're easing you into it gently.
With the hedgehogs, for example, you don't start out caring for the very young ones that need to be fed by hand and very often. The teenagers we got at first just needed cat food in their enclosure once a day, and they had to be weighed every few days. The ones living with us right now just sleep basically, and we made sure the rats can't get to them. The baby birds that keep falling from our roof in spring are much more work, they want to be fed every 20 minutes, 24 hours. These we usually bring to a pro shelter asap, cause that's not something you can keep up with a job. There's really all levels of commitment.
Your garden sounds wonderful for this kind of thing, maybe you really want to give it a thought or two. It's great that it's a wild garden in any case! And yeah, our cat sometimes kills baby rabbits and even hares as well, it's a problem. We had to get him because of the mice, and he's otherwise a lovely animal, but it's not good when they do that ... Fortunately in this respect, he's getting old now.