Critters

There are a number of species sharing our home. My wife, Kandie, and I have both always been fond of animals, and seem to have passed that fondness along to our sons. Also, at his point, all of our neighbors know that if they find any sort of stray or lost critter, Kandie is willing to try to help it out. Like the half-dozen baby pheasants we raised. It's a zoo around here sometimes.

And we try to take pretty good care of them. Once, while we were going through all the testing and worry with Dusty, one of the interns at the vet's office said "If I die and come back as an animal, I want to live at your house", because our animals tend to live longer (and healthier) than the average.

At present you'll find:

• We've got nine Cats wandering through our house. Over the years I've found nine cats running loose that were young enough to socialize and find homes for. Some cases were very touching because the right cat came along at a bad time in somebody's life. We have also adopted (and neutered!) two abandoned kittens and one wandering moocher. Plus Dusty, a brown Persian that turned out to be white and has one blue eye and one yellow eye, and which had three kittens.

• And we used to have a Chinchilla.

• Just three rabbits.

• Since we have three boys, we of course have a dog.

• The neighbor found a cockatiel in his prune tree. Now it provides a sound track to our lives. Hank liked him so much, he bought his own. Now we have stereo!

• Two ferrets amused our sons and taught ferret games to the cats. We had two others, both found running loose in town, but we found homes for them. The two we kept eventually went to that big ferret den in the sky.

  Then, a family of friends gave us their albino ferret, Ajax, because he was just living in their basement, not getting much attention. Now Andrew carries him all over the house, watches TV with him, takes naps with him, etc. Ajax seems to be a very happy ferret.

• We just adopted a goat.

• Perhaps they can't be counted as sharing our home, but we have two purebred Arabian horses. Mono's Mizz is a mare I more or less traded for a web site, and her half brother, Picasso, is a gelding I bought later.

• And lastly and most quietly, three tanks worth of fish.