Safer Pets
Scott Mclean
Okay.
Back to the more lighthearted stories. Today I’m concentrating on pets that were not rattlesnakes. Our rear ends learned that lesson!
I kind of adopted a black kitten that had been dumped and had the fur around it’s neck chewed off. It was pretty pitiful. Steve would taunt it and it grew into a large Persian looking cat. The cat would actually go up to Steve and growl. Oddly enough he backed off.
I had it trained to jump on my shoulder when I patted there. Dad was working on a car one day and reached back to scratch his back. The cat took that as a signal and landed there with claws out. The cat became airborne for a while.
Mom loved dahlias and planted many. Gophers were a constant threat. She offered 50 cents apiece for dead gophers and the cat and I became business partners.
The cat was a gopher catching machine but a bit of a sadist. It would let a gopher go in the middle of the lawn and let it almost get to the point of escape before it brought it back to the middle. I one day got the idea to give the cat something like a slice of American cheese in trade for the gopher. The cat soon caught onto the routine and we had a profitable business for awhile.
It actually figured out that only gophers, not snakes and such were trade material. Steve eventually told on me and I thought I was in trouble. Mom actually noticed that dead gopher production had gone up and said that as long as I could encourage the cat to get more gophers it was fine. She did cut the bounty to 25 cents though.
I’ve talked about my brindle Great Dane, Tigger in the past. Tigger thought she was human and that my Jeep belonged to her. Mom did not like house pets and her kitchen was a definite no. For some reason she was okay with Tigger.
The dog would sit on the couch and watch TV with her hind feet on the ground and her front feet in her lap. Efforts to change from a show she was watching were met with low growls. She would actually softly take Mom’s hand and lead her to the stove. Mom seemed to think the dog really favored her cooking, (smart dog!) and would give her something.
Lilli was the first girlfriend Tigger would let ride in the front of the Jeep. A couple of them were highly upset to be relegated to backseat status by a dog. Like many bigger breeds, she passed too soon.
Steve’s first wife had bought him a small hairy dog while they were dating. It got named Louie and had a very annoying bark, whine combination. She said the dog looked like him.
The whole family was camping on the Bumping river and my built in arthritis weather predictor kicked in. Everyone else was sleeping out in the open and I folded myself into the cab of the truck. They laughed at me. Ended up with thunder, lightning, and a torrential rain that soaked everything and had water running everywhere.
Turns out it was the least of Steve’s problems. The first clap of thunder scared Louie and the second sent it scrambling down Steve’s sleeping bag. The dog was snapping at everything and ended up biting him in a sensitive place. I heard his yell while in the pickup and saw the dog run out of the bag.
Dad made jokes for years, asking Steve if he brought a weiner for the dog.
Enough animals for tonight.
Bye.