13. February 2010 by admin.

I must, at this point, tell you of my first encounter with a goat. And no, not one of those old goats (we all know at least one), but this was a very young one. Love was her name. And I’ll tell you about her name, too.

Pat gave the spanish hornless doe her name. She was mostly white, with a black splash of color on her forehead which could have been taken for a heart. Hence her name. And, as with all other beasts that have been in our care, it fit her.

Love was a character from day one. She had been weaned a couple of months when we bought her at a flea market we frequented at that time. She rode home in my lap, screaming bloody murder all the way home. All 45 miles of the trip. I became grateful she was so young and that she didn’t have horns. If she had horns I surely would have literally wound up with my eyes poked out (yeah, sure, mom always warned me about that kind of thing…but she never ever told me not to put a goat in my lap!). It was bad enough I practically had whiplash three times over on the trip home. Not to mention a ringing ear from“baa, baa, baa” during the entire ride. That girl had an impressive, healthy set of lungs.

When we finally got her home, of course we had to build her a proper pen since, as was so often the case, we weren’t prepared for her. In those early days on the farm we never planned on bringing anyone home. It just kind of impulse farming.

When Love first came home we put her in the chicken pen we had. It was replete with two roosting areas that can only jokingly be referred to as coops. It was all temporary, and it worked for the few chickens we had at that time. But even the larger of the “coops” was never designed for a goat. But Love didn’t care. As I said, she was young. But she was still a goat.

You must visualize here. The “coop” was about 3 1/2 feet tall, with a wood shelf about halfway up between the ground and the top of the shelter. It was maybe 1 ½ feet wide. All of it composed of pine and thin plywood.

One day we went outside and looked and looked for Love. We must have looked for and called her for a good half hour. Surely she couldn’t have escaped. I suggested to Pat we might start scouring the neighborhood for the little girl. After all, she might get hurt out there with the neighborhood dogs roaming about. We were just about to leave the back yard when we heard “baa. Baa” soft and low. Not a troubled bleating at all. In retrospect it might have been a goat’s version of a snicker.

We continued to search for the source of this snickering, and found love hidden in the chicken coop, on the shelf, not stuck, just comfy as an afghan hound on a plush couch and pretty as you please. When we first laid eyes on her in amazement, her only response was to look at us with her vertical pupils. “Here I am dad. Looking for me?” I couldn’t decide if we were laughing so hard because of where she’d gotten into or because we were relieved.

We finally built her a large pen just for her. She became daddy’s girl. She loved to play hide and seek and tag with me. I would run around a shelter we’d built for her and she would run around the same structure going the opposite way. When she and I would encounter each other I would slap my knees to the fronts of my thighs and make a silly noise. She would rear up on her hind legs, standing a few feet away from me. If it were anyone else I would be well advised to get the hell out of there. But Love never threatened to harm me or Pat. In fact, just the opposite, at least once she actually saved me from harm.

We had, at one point, gotten another female goat whose name evades me at this moment. Pat, I am sure, being one with a vastly superior memory for such things, will remind me after she reads this post. But since she reads after I post it publicly, and I generally don’t revise my postings unless I catch a spelling or grammatical error after the fact, we will never know the other doe’s name unless I put it in a later dated page.

It’s an important thing to note that by this time Love was fully grown. And the largest goat we’d ever owned since spanish are full-sized caprines.

Anyway, as I recall it this other young lady didn’t especially like me. No, I don’t know why, but she didn’t. She usually just stayed away from me, but I guess this one day she felt especially ornery. I walked into the pen to feed the girls. I could see it in her eyes that she was seeing red that day (I think her name was Pretty Lady, but I couldn’t swear to it), leading me to believe that she might be part bull. Be that as it may, I started to leave the pen and she started to run at me. Now, she may have been no more of a pest were she not fully horned. And she knew full well how to hurt with those horns. Love actually got between me and the other doe, giving me time to get out with both my pride and my body fully intact.

I have to mention just a couple of other things in her memory, since I just know she’s looking over my shoulder. Love really, really like plums. We had two plum trees within her sight, and during spring, when those trees were loaded with the red treasures, each day when Pat and I came to pick those small fruit, Love looked on longingly. She wasn’t going to let us go back inside without making us feel guilty if we didn’t give her at least a few of the red fruits. She would especially like it when we would get a couple of windy days, cause that would mean a bumper crop for her taste-buds.

The other thing I want to mention is more of a caution. You folks that have raised goats know this, but for those, like me, who didn’t understand the signs, if your goat stops eating his or her usual diet for more than a couple of days, please, please, buy some worming feed. I didn’t realize the problem till it was too late to save her life. I have been wracked by guilt since we lost her, but it’s so important for you to worm your livestock susceptible to worms. Especially when you have someone in your life as special as Love was to us. That 6 years went by way too quickly. I do miss her terribly. I hope she will speak to me when I see her in Heaven.

I need to tell you about her and Godzilla, but I haven’t even started to skim the surface with that young man. Later for that.

Well, that was a long-winded posting. Until next time, dear reader, smile. It could be worse. With all this snow, be grateful it’s not doing it in July.

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3. February 2010 by admin.

Scamper was our first cat. As so many felines are, Scamper was abandoned as a tyke. He not only was barely weaned, but was torn from his mother before he was completely able to eat solid food. Pat, having worked in that pet supply store (since I have nothing good to say about this major chain, as it treats its employees not quite as well as cattle on a ranch, and has as much contempt for it’s customers, though it fawns to them like a court jester, they shall remain unnamed), voted herself as most likely to take him home. And she did.

Being my first up-close and personal experience with a cat, I was fascinated by this little guy. And little he was; in fact, tiny would not be incorrect. He literally fit inside a beer six-pack container, which is what he came home in. I don’t know if he drank all the beer, but the case was empty aside from this “defenseless” creature. Now, you’ll notice I put the word defenseless in brackets. There is a reason for this. You cannot walk around naked with a kitten in the same house. Especially if you’re a guy. If you’ve never been in the presence of a very young cat, you’ve never known the sheer delight of their claws. And they like to bat at things with their paws. All the more so if they dangle. Gentlemen, are you starting to get the picture? I can see some of you running to get your drawers on, so I think I’ve said enough to forewarn you. A kitten is precious, but they will tenderize any meat that comes near them.

Another thing I noticed about cats is it takes very little to keep them entertained. If you have your clothes on (which, as indicated above, I highly recommend), all you have to do is throw a balled-up piece of paper, and they’ll be on it like sailors seeing their first woman after six-months at sea. (Okay, so I could have described that differently, but what fun would that be? I am not writing this from a priest’s perspective.)

During the first few days with Scamper, I continued to learn a lot about felines. For instance, when a cat plays, it’s genetically not possible for them to not attack the object of their playing. A hand gets clawed, scored and bitten, albeit gently in the case of Scamper. I began to understand why they like mice so well. His head fit into Pat’s hand, and like any cat, he loved to have his head scruffed. Being still small, we tried to be as gentle as possible with him. It would have been nice had he returned the favor. Even being gentle, Scamper still had razors in his paws, and he hadn’t yet figured out how to control them.

Fast-forward to his adulthood. This tiny creature grew into a domestic cat that obviously had quite a few big-cat genes. He developed a dimpled nose and a pouch on him that would make a lion envious. But despite his largess, there was not an ounce of fat that didn’t need to be there. He was active, but as we added more cats, his stature as our elder states-cat never changed. He rarely got into tiffs with the other cats, nor was he challenged by anyone else. The only one with whom he ever had an argument was Princess, our second-in-command.

Princess got her name because she acted like one. She was a beautifully marked ring-tail patch siamese, and she knew she was gorgeous. In fact, were she human she would be the exact kind of woman that would turn me off because I hate that attitude, even if she was the perfect eye-candy, But Princess had claimed me as her person, and all it took was her curling up in a tight little ball on my lap and I was hooked. This beautiful little kitty, who, while weaned when she came home a couple of weeks after Scamper’s triumphant arrival, was not very much larger than Scamper was when he came to live with us, had me hook, line and sinker. I absolutely fell in love with cats. I’ve been a cat person ever since. In fact, I have seen a mug in a catalogue which had the imprint “ask me about the cute thing my cat did, because I’ll tell you anyway”, or words to that effect. Truer words were never spoken. A person smitten by a cat is worse than a first-time father. I could blather on about Princess for hours. Eventually people would see me coming and remember they had an appointment in another county they had to attend to.

The last thing I’ll mention about Princess was her agility. I know all cats are agile to the nth degree, but Princess was remarkable. At one time we had a pile of boxes in the living room at 6 feet high. I could see her calculate how much distance she would have to leap to get to the top of the boxes. In my mind’s eye she was figuring out wind-speed, azimuth and translating that into effort. And all this without having to build a computer. Princess cost us nothing to bring home. How much did it cost NASA to build a calculator to figure this out? Now, who’s smarter?

Both Scamper and Princess have since gone on to their eternal reward, but I will forever be grateful to my Princess for teaching me that one of the most rewarding things in the world is being owned by a cat. And believe me, they own you. Just ask them.

Ciao for now dear reader. Until next time, may you be affectionately stared at by a cat. And yes, the cat is wondering if you’re all there. It’s what they do.

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22. January 2010 by admin.

I must apologize for having not posted for the last couple of weeks. I wasn’t inspired at all last week, and so far this week it’s been really hectic around here. But I finally decided to use a few minutes to jot a few more words.

For this entry, I have to fast-forward a few years. When daddy shows a picture of Selma, the usual, and most often the only immediate response is “that’s a fat cat!” Selma is one of our older cats, though we brought her home before Butternut, who was the last one to set up his litter box here.

Selma is a cat. At least she’s supposed to be. And she is big. At her biggest she probably weighed something along the order of 20 pounds. She now tips the scales at about 13 or so. Her weight loss was not the result of Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers, nor of an exercise program (her legs aren’t long enough to reach the pedals on my recumbent bike). Just part of her aging.

The saga of Selma started at least six months before she came to live here. She was part of a home of what some call a hoarder and some call a collector. Whatever you might call this lady, she had close to a hundred cats when she became physically and mentally unable to care for them. An anonymous tip sent animal control into this woman’s home, where they found 96 cats in varying condition. Those who were still alive were very undernourished.

This collection of poor souls included the cat the pound would refer to as Selma. She was made healthier, fixed (ah, there’s that term again), and put up for adoption. She was skinny as a train rail when she met the other kitties here. Scrawny and scared to death of everything. We did all we could to make her feel comfortable, including a period of getting used to one room without other cats. She would come out of the room from time-to-time, warily so. And when she did it was to grab a few morsels of food and skitter back to her insular world. It was painful to watch, but we did notice progress, so the panic button was not hit. Well, not by Pat, but I had my doubts.

The other cats eventually learned to tolerate Selma, and when the little girl discovered she would be allowed to eat without harassment, she did just that. She ate and ate. I was beginning to wonder if she had somehow become permanently fused to the feed canister.

We have referred to Selma as our bullcat for some years now. In case you wonder why, picture a bulldog with it’s rolling gait, especially as it walks toward you, then you will get a snapshot of Selma.

This is Selma

The photo above was taken at Christmastime some few years ago. It’s hard to get a good look at her impressive girth, but you get an idea. Oh, and the ribbon and the reindeer atop will give you some idea how tolerant Selma is of our foibles.

The walk is not the only thing that makes one compare her to a canine. If you scratch her just right the hind leg starts going. And if she is laying down and wants to be petted, besides being very vocal about it, she will often turn over so you can rub her belly. What can I tell you? She is a feline-challenged cat.

Seeing Selma get onto a platform or a chair a couple of feet off the floor is something to marvel at. And probably cause a huge laugh, too. It’s like watching a repeating frame of film that directors will sometimes use to get a laugh. She starts to jump, runs in reverse, starts again and repeats the process three or four times. She will eventually get onto her perch, not the least bit insulted that she was laughed at. She just lays down and does whatever she does.

Selma has the loudest purr of nearly any cat I’ve ever known. If she’s in my lap while I’ve got the TV on I have to turn the volume on the television up. That’s almost an exaggeration, but not quite. She is loud. Her meow is more like a demand, but it does not sound like any meow I’ve knowledge of. It’s like a guttural version of “Hey!” And yes, it actually sounds like the word “Hey.”

As noted above, our fat cat is very tolerant. You can do almost anything to her as long as she is getting loved on. We’ve never tossed her in the air (I’m not sure she would truly appreciate that), but we have picked her up and rocked her in our arms. She just stretches out and enjoys the ride. She minds her own business but will smack any other animal that invades her space; dog, another cat, it doesn’t matter. Nor does the size of the dog at whom she takes a swipe at. She’s not nasty or mean. She just wants to be left alone in case some human wants to love on her. She wants those goodies all to herself.

Well, there is a ton of other things I could tell about our small bit of kittie tonnage, but suffice it to say she has given us a lot to smile about and just plain laugh about. And dear reader, that does it for this installment. I will try to be more regular and add one or two entries a week. Until next time, keep smiling. It throws people off-base.

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8. January 2010 by admin.

The first fall after our arrival, we decided to sell stuff at a permanent flea market “in town.” Okay, now I will admit, coming from a very big city, this is not a term I would have ever thought I would use. This word is something I would hear on Bonanza or some such TV show. But, still, any store you would have to travel to for anything was “in town.” And that, as you would expect, was pretty much everything. Oh, there was this dinky little store in “downtown” Josephine, but the idea of paying $5.00 (this was in 1994, remember) for a dozen for eggs was just too much for me to bear.

Well, we opened up shop in a city just north of Dallas. Of course, since it’s a flea market where most folks selling are not professionals, we had a lot of competition for the same types of items. As a result, we didn’t exactly turn much profit. In fact, we often barely made our rent payment.

But, all was not in vain. A few doors down from our booth was a couple selling puppies. Okay, I don’t approve of puppy mills, but Pat, being a sucker for animals of all sorts (I was still not convinced I was animal person. Patience dear reader. My being sucked in will become obvious as this blog continues), had to check it out. This went on a couple of months, till one day in the spring she came back to our booth with a puppy. The dog, I will admit, was cute as a button. I noted that he had large feet. I thought that just meant he was healthy. What did I know? Pat just smiled and handed him to me. Pat said he’s a catahoula, which is a breed raised to herd wild pigs. She said he looked up at her and said “My name is Sam.” I’d been with Pat long enough by now to know she was about as close to “Dr Doolittle” as I was ever going to come, so I didn’t even raise an eyebrow. I just patted the little fella on the head and welcomed him home, since I knew it was pointless to argue.

We came home with Sam, not knowing exactly what catahoula’s were like. Mind you, Pat knows more about canines than anyone I know, but even she didn’t know as much about that breed as she should have. For example, Sam had his own yard to himself, a pretty good-sized section of land we’d fenced off just for him. But we didn’t realize Catahoua’s, for all their size, were scared of their own shadows. When he saw a rock in the yard that he hadn’t seen before, we had to move it out of his sight or we would not get a chance to have a decent conversation in our house. He barked and whimpered at that rock until it walked out of his line of vision.Well, the yard didn’t turn out just for him. But more about the other denizens of that yard as we go forward.

The first fall after Sam was spending most of his day in the yard, after many trees had fallen bared by nature, Sam started barking and barking. Sam had a very shrill bark for a 60 pound dog; the kind of shrill that tore through your bones and bored into your brain. It did to me kinda like I imagined that insect that Khan did to the crew of The Enterprise in the second Star Trek movie. At least it had much the same effect. This barking went on for what seemed like days. Then we figured it out. And it wasn’t something we could easily move from Sam’s line of sight.

What Sam was carrying on about was a couple of fields over there was a horse standing in a pasture. During sunny days it was keeping warm by just standing still, letting the suns rays caress him. We were more than sure that the horse did this very often, but now that there were no leaves on the trees blocking Sam’s view, he could see the horse. And it was something different. Catahoula’s don’t like anything new and different, and to him the horse was invading his territory. Hence he barked…and barked…and so forth. By early February we were praying for spring and leaves.

As time went on we got one more dog from the puppy-mill people, Chevy. I gave her that name since she was a treeing walker fox hound (okay, let’s just pretend these dogs are pure-bred). When she was just weaned, as all of the animals this couple were selling were, she had round markings just above each eye that, to me, a creature of the city, looked like headlights. Hey . . . You find your metaphors where you can. Hence, the dog became known as Chevy. Very sweet, and the perfect companion for Sam. She kept him in his place, even after they were both “fixed.”

If I may digress for a moment (did I just hear someone sarcastically say “what a novel concept?” And hey, did the words “oh, here we go again” just pass my ears?), why do they call having an animal rendered incapable of making or having little animals of their kind “fixed?” I mean, if a child removes the wheels off its new wagon, you would say the child broke it. So why not call the practice of removing an animals sex organs breaking it? Now please understand this does not in any way mean I am against cutting an animal. Ultimately it’s the best thing for all concerned; the animal is healthier, lives longer, doesn’t have babies that may wind up being euthanized through no fault of the animal’s, and most of the time a better pet for it. But still, one has to wonder about the “code words”.

I mentioned that Chevy was the queen of the yard Sam and her shared. Chevy would more often than not steal Sam’s toys and horde them. Not sure why she did that, other than because she could. No, Chevy didn’t play with those toys. She just took them from Sam and kept them from him.

Then came Hershey and Taffy, our two chihuahuas More about them in my next installment. Until then, dear reader, have a great week. And keep smiling. Makes them wonder what you’re up to.

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24. December 2009 by admin.

If you had known me prior to meeting Pat, you would have known I didn’t have any special affection for animals of any sort. Oh, sure one was part of the family when I was growing up. The only characteristic I really remember about her was that all my mother had to do to get her to cower was bite her hand. Mom was Irish, but she was heavily influenced by dad’s family, which was very Italian. Hence, my mother would get her wish by biting her hand.

I had met Pat in an online chat room before the internet was the internet. She was planning on leaving her house in Florida to move up to NY. I told her if she needed a place to crash, she could always call me. As much as I didn’t really expect it (in fact, the offer was made in the same spirit as so many such internet offers are made; I was just trying to sound heroic), when Pat showed up at my workplace on 61^st St, after I composed myself into at least trying to look pleased (which I am sure I did no such thing) I was true to my word and brought her home. Well, since I had taken the train and subway in from Elizabeth, where I lived at the time, I let Pat drive us to the apartment in which we would live for the next several months. Pat, and her afghan hound, Crystal.

Crystal and I had an understanding. I didn’t mess with her and she mostly ignored me. Ignoring people is as easy for an afghan as it is for most cats. They’re beautiful animals, and they will constantly let you know that. And they tolerate no angry words directed at them or those whom they love. And Crystal loved Pat.

I found out how much she loved Pat when I hollered at Pat about something or other (no I don’t remember. I have short-term memory loss about such things). Before I knew it I was changing my pillowcase because Crystal squatted on my pillow and let go. Needless to say I never yelled in front of her again.

As time went on, and Pat and I grew closer, the old girl and I developed a relationship, albeit strained at times. I had yet to fully appreciate dogs, but I did begin to understand Crystal.

We were eventually forced to give Crystal to a friend. Shortly thereafter we walked into a pet store and met the first of several guinea pigs we would call ours. The most memorable of these was Mikie. Mike was in the bottom aquarium of a 2-level stand. When I passed the stand I couldn’t help but notice Mikie was standing on his hind legs as if to beg me to take him home, which is, of course, exactly what I did. He wasn’t our first guinea pig, but he had the most charming personality.

We had about seven or eight guinea pigs when we moved from NJ to TX. We had a van-line move the bigger stuff, but we were able to stuff a ton of things into the Chevy, including the cages replete with guinea pigs and one rabbit, named Midnight. And sneaking all the cages into a motel room on the way to TX was no small feat. But they enjoyed the ambiance, and the room service, as provided for by Pat and me, was beyond reproach.

There is so much more to tell you about how I eventually learned to not only love animals, but how they became an integral part of my life. Until next time, dear reader, enjoy yourself and your family, regardless of the number of legs they may have.

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