"T" and Fergus

This is a shot of T and Fergus which was taken last fall after bringing Fergus home. We've had T for over a year now. He is a Chow and Labrador cross that we got from our former neighbor. He is a really good dog. Before we built the fence last summer, he got out and became intimately acquainted with our neighbors Akita dog. Fergus is a consequence of T's actions and is his son.

Our daughter Katie learned an awful, yet unforgettable, lesson on reproduction the day Fergus was conceived. She chased T over to Davisons to bring him home. She had to separate the lovebirds, so to speak. She hasn't spoken much about it since, and I don't blame her. At any rate, we now have two dogs and they are really fun to have around. Fergus is as big as T now and may surpass him in size.

I have always enjoyed having animals around and have loved spending time with them since I was young. When I am playing with the dogs, I feel just as happy as I did when I was little. Most of my youth was spent on an acreage in Leavitt. We always had a dog around and a whole mess of cats. There is a picture of me somewhere that was taken when I was about 11. I am wearing some camouflage pants, a bright blue BYU Fun Festa shirt and a really sappy smile that was aimed at our cat, Kitty.

Kitty was rather old by that time and was a bit of a floosie. She was missing most of her front teeth, but that didn't seem to bother any tom cats that happened by. As a result, there was always a new batch of kittens to love, play with, and grow attached to. There was a time there where some of the older kittens were still around, which muddied the gene pool something awful. To avoid being too graphic, Kitty's family tree didn't branch too cleanly, if at all. Before the pride was thinned, we had some distinct "special needs" kittens stumbling around.

Whenever I would enter the barn, I remember one kitten running to greet me. It ran well, but didn't have the greatest sense of balance. It would always veer to one side as it ran. There was never much of a gleam in its eyes when you could get it to focus on you. One side effect of the shallow gene pool was a rather high mortality rate. That was rather disturbing, but was fairly frequent.

My sister Karen had a favorite cat she had named Scratch. Scratch went missing one winter and we looked everywhere for her. One of our passtimes was to go walking on the gravel road out in front of our yard. It was cold that day and we were playing on the smooth sheet of ice that filled one rut. When we cleaned the snow off the ice, that is when we found poor Scratch. She had met her end trying to cross the road and was now flat and very much two dimensional under the sheet of ice. Nature had created a rather morbid piece of art for us to discover. I have started writing a song called " Flat Scratch Fever" but haven't finished it, mostly out of respect to my sister, who, like me, still bears the scars of more graphic and traumatizing pet demise experiences that I won't relate here.

Anyway, time goes on and Karen and I both have healthy, living pets to help erase the trauma of the past.