Animals in my Life

There have been a lot of animals in my life. My latest animal, ZoomCat, is on my desk next to me washing herself as I write this. The other day I was watching her as she napped when it came to me that she is the latest in a long line of animals to have had some rather large part of my life. I thought that it would be interesting to list them and their stories.


Cindy

A Terrier / Dalmatian cross, Cindy was the first dog in my life. I have relatively few memories of her - she was just always there. She was there when we lived in our first house on Rosita (the Green House), there when we lived in the house on University (the Big House), and she was with us when we moved to Salt Lake. I don't remember really having any relationship with her in much the same way that I didn't have a relationship with a table or chair. She was there, had pretty much always been there, and as far as I could tell, would always be there.

We would occasionally take a weekend day trip to Topaz Mountain in the west desert. Getting to Topaz was a bit of a drive on graded dirt roads through the sage brush, across dry washes and around mountains. On one such trip, Cindy, being the unobtrusive dog she was, managed to get herself left behind. It was some time before anyone noticed that she wasn't in the truck with us. Nothing for it but to turn around and fetch her.

When we got back to Topaz, she was there waiting for us. But then the problem was fuel. Did we have enough to get to a gas station? As it turned out, we didn't. Sun going down, Dad built a fire on the road and we waited until a local rancher stopped and took Dad off to get some gas.


The Shelty

For a very short time, there was a shelty. If she(?) had a name I don't remember it.


Two Rats

When I was very young I had two rats. They lived in a cage in Dad's shop at the Green House. I have only one memory of them. I remember a warm sunny day, playing with a ball in the back yard. I remember that I was trying to throw the ball as high as I could. I remember wondering if a rat would go as high as the ball. So, I did the experiment.

When the results of my experiment were inconclusive, and when the first rat wasn't moving around as much as he had been, I put him back in the cage and got the other rat to continue my experiments.

Mom and I dug a little hole behind the fence at the corner of the yard near the canal and put two rats in their paper-bag coffin into it.


Percy, Mathilda, and Gretta Graybunny

Three rabbits make more rabbits. Percy and Mathilda were your standard white with pink eyes rabbits. Gretta, of course was gray. We allowed them to breed but I don't know what happened to the little ones. I remember being sent into a place called the co-op to talk to the produce man about getting old veggies to feed the rabbits. That's where I learned the term: two-bits. The produce man wanted two-bits for a big bag of old lettuce leaves.

Just before we left the Big House to move to Salt Lake, we sold the rabbits, hutch and whatever other assorted rabbit furniture. I remember seeing it all loaded up in a trailer in the driveway.


Heidi

One summer while I was away at a boy's camp in Victor, Idaho, Cindy passed and Heidi came into the family's life. Heidi was a silver-gray German Shepherd. Somehow responsibility for her training fell to me. She made it easy.

We did our training at Liberty Park and practiced at home in the backyard. Such a clever dog she was, that by the end of our training, we were practicing her lessons without a leash and with visual rather than verbal commands. The test at the end of the course required us to demonstrate proficiency in the standard come, sit, stay, down, heal commands, all of which could be executed on lead. I remember all of the other class participants doing the test that way. Not Heidi and me. Nope, off-lead, and with visual commands only.

Heidi liked sticks. Not your standard stick suitable for tossing, no, loooong sticks. Six-feet, eight-feet. You know, sticks. Long sticks not being available to her on the beaches of Oregon or Washington, she substituted the long whip-like kelp that had washed ashore.

When Ralph's Boy Scout Troop decided to do a fifty-mile hike (Mirror Lake to Moon Lake in the High Unitah Wilderness) we tagged along to help in the event that someone needed to be evacuated. For Heidi it must have been a two-hundred or more mile hike as she checked up on Mom, Dad and Susan at the back, Ralph with the troop, and me way out in the vanguard.

While at sea in 1981 I got this familygram:

Heidi euthanized 10/21/81, suspect probable embolism. Had already agreed to accept female pup from church couple whose son allergic. Beautiful black. Has many of Heidi's good qualities; calmer than Gretchen. Dad has new motorcycle Honda Cl360.

Missy

I'm not sure when Missy came to be part of my life. I think that it was after Heidi and before Gretchen. A Siamese cat, she wasn't a particularly important part of my life at the time. She was very good at intimidating stray dogs that had somehow managed to get into our yard. She would sit in the breezeway and so prevent the stray from getting past her and I one day watched as she chased another through what seemed to me to be a rather small hole in the back fence. It's unclear to me, how these dogs got into the yard in the first place unless she tempted them like the spider in its web.


Gretchen

Gretchen was more my brother's dog than mine so I have relatively few memories of her. Another German Shepherd, of more or less the standard coloration, Gretchen liked to chase water or, if we were shoveling snow, she'd chase that too.


Liese

Yet another German Shepherd, Liese took Heidi's place after her passing. By this time, I was out of the house and punching holes in the ocean with a nuclear powered submarine. I count Liese as the last family animal in my life because she was around after I returned from the Navy and before I bought my first house.


Sarah

My first dog to go with my first house in late 1982 or early 1983. Sarah was a Doberman/Shepherd cross, I think. She had the Doberman's coloring with the Shepherd's body structure. She cost me fifty bucks.

Because she had a propensity to go expoloring and never saw a six-foot fence she couldn't climb, she spent much of her life tethered. If I took her with me to the store, I had to make sure that she couldn't get out of the Jeep because she'd go exploring the parking lot and then return to approximately the right location and jump into the whatever car or truck had its window open. I had to shorten her tether when I came home one night and discovered her atop the six-foot wall at the north side of her yard.

Climbing on rocks has a certain appeal to me - not the kind of climbing that uses ropes but climbing like I did as a child. In Grand Gultch, Sarah's climbing ability was tested because there were lots of those rocks that needed to be climbed.

This desire of hers to go whereever I went got her into a bit of trouble once. One of the programmers a Soundstream, Rich Wagnerin, had a boat - a Gulfstream, I'd worked for them just out of high school - and a parachute. Several of us would sometimes take a weekend trip into southeastern Idaho to a place called Twin Lakes north of Preston for camping, beer, water skiing, beer, and good times. Only once were we able to to talk Rich into getting the parachute out.

The parachute was one of the older style - not the flying wing one sees today. We laid the parachute out on a little hill on the lee shore, ran a rope from the harness to the boat and strapped me in. I don't know why I was first to go. Tow boat idles ahead until there's just a bit of a tug on the harness, two of us open the chute to catch the wind and as it begins to fill, the boat takes off.

Sarah, wanting to come with me runs alongside as I'm lifted off the ground. I remember looking down at her from maybe twenty feet and seeing her running down the hill but looking up at me. What she forgot - and I haven't mentioned because it would spoil the story - is that at the bottom of the hill is a small cliff of five to ten feet. Poor dog. She ran right off the edge of the cliff and into the lake.

An old, old dog, Sarah made it to about fourteen. When we returned from some trip we'd taken, I went to the vet where we boarded our dogs and when she didn't seem to recognize me and was having difficulty walking, I elected to let her go.


Tweeter and Midrange

Tweeter and Midrange were a pair of canaries I got from Mom. Tweeter was named by the woman who lived down the street from me. Because at the time I was working in the audio industry, and because the second canary sang in a generally lower range - alto to Tweeter's soprano, I named him Midrange. Later Deb and I would have more canaries so I no longer remember much about these two.


Marti

Marti was dumb as a stone, but no stone was ever as happy as he was. The neighbor next door was given this dog but with her two children and another dog called Scout, Marti was more than she wanted to take on. She kept him for a year or so and during that time he became pretty good pals with Sarah. One sunny spring or summer evening, while I was sitting on the front porch, nursing a beer and watching the world go by, the neighbor wandered over and after some small-talk, asked if I'd take Marti off her hands. The only stipulation was that I couldn't change his name.

He may have been dumb as a stone, but he was just as talented at getting out of the yard as Sarah. Putting him on a separate tether proved problematic because he shared the dog house so had to have enough freedom to get in to it. Invariably, they would become entangled which made Sarah angry. The solution was a short tether from Sarah to Marti. When she got upset with him, he could simply backup to the end of the tether. While not the best, and I wouldn't do this again, it did work.

Before I got Marti, I would excercise Sarah by letting her run with me while I rode my bicycle. I learned early-on that I could not control the bike and her if I held her leash in my hand - even at Sarah's walking pace. If I tied her leash to the headpost, I had control of the bike and so, control of her. Adding Marti to the run with his short tether outboard of Sarah gave me a two-dog-power motor.

The two-dog-power-motor worked great. The dogs loved to do the run and I didn't have to trim toenails. But, all good things must end. We were doing our normal run when, from between two cars, came this fluffy white yappy thing. Marti saw it and put on a serious burst of speed. He zoomed ahead (dragging Sarah with him), and veered in front of me. Having no time to react, I collided with him and endoed. When I could look up, Marti had the fluffy white yappy thing in his mouth and was giving it a good shake. Somehow, by the time I got to my feet, the fluffy white yappy thing had wriggled out of Marti's mouth and was gone. Bruised and scraped, we didn't do the two-dog-power-motor thing again.

When we moved to Herriman, Sarah and Marti got a proper lidded kennel.

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Last modified: 2009 Mar 01 2217:33 UTC