Story My Experiences With Pets

[BlueWidow]

I know that many people on here have pets and like to talk about them and post photos.
I thought I would write a thread discussing some of my experiences with various pets I've had over the years, and try to explain why in my adult years I've never had a pet.

The first two stories both happened before I was born or when I was very very young, so they aren't about my own personal pets, but the pets of other people in my family. They're just funny stories that I've had floating around in my head and thought I would share them with you.

Story #1- The Hog & The Dog

Before I was born, and up until I turned 1, my family lived on a farm out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest neighbor in any direction was a mile or more down the road.
It was a working farm with pigs, chickens, a cow or two, goats, and a huge garden with vegetables and fruits. Along with the farm animals, they were also domestic animals like dogs and cats. Most of the animals, including the dogs and cats, were not really there as pets. They were all considered working animals. The cats were there to keep mice away and the dogs were mostly my dad's hunting dogs. There may have been a few that were pets, but for the most part, all the animals on the farm were there because they produced something that my family needed to survive, or they performed a service that my family needed to survive. I believe most of the produce was grown for my family's personal consumption, as well as the eggs some of the chickens produced and so on. Occasionally though, my mother would take any spare produce or eggs or other food that she got and sell it at a local produce stand.

Anyway, one day one of the pigs was giving birth and my dad was getting ready to kill the runt. It was common practice to knock the runt in the head with a hammer and kill it so that the mother wouldn't waste its resources taking care of it. However, my mom stopped my dad from killing it, and she wrapped it in a blanket and took it in the house. It's similar to the beginning of Charlotte's Web. My mom bottle-fed the pig and she laid him near the dog for warmth. The dog seemed to tolerate the pig, so my mom left him there.
As time went on, the pig got bigger and my mom tried to re-introduce him to the pig pen so he could be with the other pigs. This pig had other ideas however, and had decided that he was a dog. He stuck to the dog like Velcro. By the way, neither of these animals had names. They were just called "the hog" and "the dog". I don't know if that was on purpose because my dad didn't want anyone getting attached to them, or what the reason was. Anyway, the hog refused to eat slops with the other pigs. He refused to stay in the pen with the other pigs, and he didn't act like the other pigs. He slept with the dog, he ate with the dog, and he went wherever the dog went, and did whatever the dog did. He thought he was a dog.
However, as the pig grew, he got harder and harder to control and took up more and more space. I believe he eventually got to be over 100 pounds and his weight was starting to become a problem.
One day everyone had gone into town.
Before my family left, the hog had fallen asleep outside next to the dog, but the dog had woke up and gone back inside the house while the hog was still asleep. So, when my family left, the dog was inside the house, but the hog was outside the house. The hog seemed to consider the dog something of a security blanket and if he wasn't near the dog, he would completely lose it. As I said, he followed the dog everywhere and was attached to him like Velcro. I'm not sure that the dog exactly liked the pig very much, but he tolerated him. I think however, he probably wanted time to himself every once in a while, but the pig wouldn't give him any time to himself. If the pig was awake, he was wherever the dog was. So anyway, the pig woke up and realized that the dog was gone. He frantically searched around the yard for the dog. The way that they know this is because he left a trail of destruction in his wake as he frantically searched for the dog. Eventually, not finding the dog outside, the pig decided he was going in the house to find the dog. He attempted to get in through a window and left behind some damage when he couldn't get through it. He then circled the house several times trying to find a way in. He eventually charged the front door, and basically used his body as a battering ram and smashed right through the door. My family came home and the screen door was hanging off the hinge, and the front door had clearly been forced open. At first, my family thought we had been robbed or something. It looked like a tornado had hit inside the house, as the pig had gone all around searching for the dog, leaving all sorts of destruction everywhere he went.
Eventually, they found the pig sleeping peacefully next to the dog. Once he found the dog, he laid down next to him and went to sleep and was perfectly calm once again.
This sounds like a story that I made up and I believe I've even seen similar things on TV. But I have pictures of the hog and the dog together. That's how I know the story is true, even though it happened before I was born.
After this episode, my dad decided that we had to get rid of the hog because he was causing too much damage and havoc, so he agreed to sell him to some people that lived in another town. In the end, they decided to buy the hog and the dog together and they promised that they would put them somewhere where they would have plenty of room to roam around and not cause any damage, and that they would be allowed to live to an old age. I'm hoping that's what happened.

 

[Deleted member 1465]

Thanks for the story. You really should be a writer. It's always a pleasure to read your stuff.

 

[BlueWidow]

Story #2. The Fancy Dog House

As I said above, by the time I was one, my family had moved to a house in town. My dad was an avid hunter and he always had hunting dogs, but there was one particular dog that was his favorite. The dog's name was Spot. I am remembering all this from the point of view of an extremely small child, so I'm just going to tell you what I remember and it may or may not be completely accurate. This is just what I remember from being very young. Spot was a mixed breed dog. He was white with black patches all over his body. He had one black patch over his right eye, and several black patches all over his body, and his tail was black, with the exception of the tip which was white. He was a mixture of different hound breeds, such as basset hound, Beagle, and bloodhound. He may have had some other breeds mixed in too because I remember him being fairly tall, but I don't know if he actually was tall, or if that was just my perception of him because of how small I was at the time. I seem to remember him having some pointer mixed in as well though.
Again, he was my dad's pet, but he was also a hunting dog. My dad said he was the best hunting dog he ever owned. My dad treated Spot like a king. This was back in the 1970s when people didn't spoil their pets the way they do today. But Spot had his own dog house, and it was no ordinary dog house.
There were two steps leading up to the foundation of the house, and it was a two-story doghouse. It was so big that, as a small child, I could go in there and play inside it. It sort of doubled as a playhouse for me, as well as a doghouse for Spot. But the most extraordinary thing about it was that the floor on the bottom level was heated. There was some kind of generator hooked up to it or something. I don't know exactly how they heated the floor, but in the winter I could go in there and play and be warm. They later did the exact same thing in an episode of King of the Hill, where Hank built Ladybird a doghouse that had heated flooring.
Unfortunately, Spot got hit by a car on the road beside our house. On one side of our house was a side road, which is the one that Spot got killed on, and I later had a dog get killed on. On the other side of our house, was a busy highway, where many of my pets died because my dad kept letting them out of the house, and they would all run out into the highway and get hit. Anyway, Spot got hit on the side road next to our house. My dad was just crushed. Spot's doghouse stood empty for about a year after he died, and then my dad eventually sold it to somebody and it was taken away. However, the foundation with the two steps going up to it remained, A reminder of where Spot's house used to be. My dad never got another hunting dog after Spot. It also wasn't too long after Spot died that my mom also died. My dad hunted after that, but not nearly as often as he had before those two events.

 

[BlueWidow]

Story #3. The Tabby Tragedy

I would like to warn people before they read this story that it could be very triggering for some people. There is severe violence to both people and animals included in this story, so if it's going to upset you please skip it. It is a very violent and horrific story. I thought about not telling it here, but it is one of the prime reasons why I don't have a pet to this day, so I thought I would include it. After this following incident happened, I blocked it out of my mind and completely forgot about it for decades. Then, in 2009, I was wrongly committed to a psych ward and the only way I could get out was to agree to go into a group program for depressed people. In order to graduate from this depression group, I had to agree to get an individual therapist and see her twice a month at least. This therapist performed EMDR therapy and one of the things she asked me to do was think of traumatic events in my life that we could use to perform the therapy on and perhaps alleviate some of the trauma surrounding those events. As I was attempting to think of traumatic events that I could use for my therapy, this event suddenly popped back into my head out of nowhere after me not even thinking about it for decades. I wish to God it would've just been left hidden in my memory because now I can't get rid of it again and I don't like thinking about it.
First, the set up. A few years after my mom died, my dad met my first stepmother in a bar. He met her when I was 5, they married when I was 6, and by the time I was 8, they were getting a divorce. My stepmother had four kids by other marriages. Her three oldest kids were from her first marriage. During this marriage, her husband had physically abused her. She eventually got out of that marriage and then met a second man and had her youngest son, whom I'll just refer to as LL. Her second husband had committed an armed robbery and had been sent to prison. She divorced him while he was in prison, then she met and married my dad.
The first year of their marriage, when I was 6, was the single happiest year of my entire childhood. LL was three years younger than me, but he and I were like two peas in a pod. He was the brother, the sibling that I always wanted but never had. We were inseparable. I remember long summer days where we would spend all day running around outside.
Stepmother #1 was very funny and a very good mother. I had found a book at a yard sale called "The Outdoor Cookbook", which was a joke cookbook for kids that had recipes in it for things like, Fried Rocks and Backyard Salad. LL and I would gather twigs and leaves and stuff together and make it into a "salad", then his mother would come outside and pretend like she was eating it and she would make noises like Cookie Monster and throw the stuff around and we would laugh. She was always doing silly things to make us laugh.
When we would go to the swimming pool, she would take a tub of butter with her and smear herself in it and lay out in the sun. LL and I thought it was the funniest thing ever and we would happily smear the butter all over her back for her. She was also an excellent cook and she made everything from scratch. One of her specialties was beef and noodles with homemade noodles. She would always encourage LL and me to help her in the kitchen. She would always save out a piece of dough and cut it in two and we would each have our own piece of dough to make anything we wanted out of. I remember one time, we made homemade crackers. We were both so excited that the next day, even though it was hot outside because it was summer, we demanded to have soup so that we could eat our crackers that we made ourselves. That time only lasted for a little over a year before things started going horribly wrong, but when I look back on it, it seems like much longer.
At some point, stepmother #1's second husband got out of prison. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with his son, LL.
However, he saw no reason not to continue his relationship with LL's mother, even though she was now married to my dad. They started having an affair, and they weren't really doing much to keep it a secret. We lived in a very small midwestern town where everyone knew everyone else. Everyone knew everyone's business. You couldn't do anything in town and keep it a secret for long, particularly not something this sordid. Stepmother #1 started dropping me and LL off at her mother's house during the day when we weren't in school. She stopped cooking and spending time with us. Any spare time she had away from my dad, she was gone and we were either dropped off at her mother's house or left with a babysitter.
Eventually, my dad's buddies at the bar started teasing him about it. They would say things to him like, " I saw your wife's car parked in front of the motel down on the edge of town. I wonder what she was doing there in the middle of the afternoon?". At first, my dad didn't pay any attention to them because he thought they were just teasing him and giving him a hard time. But eventually he couldn't ignore that there was something going on, and he was apparently the last one to know about it. He confronted stepmother #1 and she denied that there was anything going on. Eventually, it got to the point where they would both start drinking. Then the arguing would start. My dad would demand that she admit what she was doing, and she would continually deny that she was doing anything. Eventually, one night my dad exploded and he started hitting her. This was very unlike my dad. He was very emotionally and verbally abusive to me and many other people around him, but he was never physically abusive. I got spanked as a child occasionally, but never beaten or abused. It was common practice back then to spank your kids. As far as I know, my dad never hit my mother or any other person. But I think the fact that my step mother was cheating on him and the entire town knew it, and she wouldn't just admit it to him, somehow drove him over the edge. I'm not saying what he did was right, but I can see both sides of it. I'm sure he felt humiliated by her. And all his buddies at the bar constantly teasing him about it probably didn't help either. It got to be an occurrence several times a month, and then several times a week, that they would both be drinking. Once they were drunk, my dad would fly into a rage and start hitting her. She would lie on the ground and let him hit her until he got tired. Then she would calmly get up and walk over to the phone and call the police. The police would come and take him away. He would spend the night in jail. Then she would go the next day and refuse to press charges against him and they would let him out. This scenario repeated over and over. And I, at the age of 7, and LL, at the age of 4, had a front row seat for the whole thing. And we were alone. We each had older siblings that should have been there trying to protect us from this, but instead they all protected themselves and abandoned us.
My sister went to live with a friend of hers' leaving me alone in the house with this violence. LL's older siblings went to live with their older sister who was then married and out of the house. I still don't understand why they didn't take LL with them. They left him alone to be exposed to this violence. Maybe there was some circumstance that I don't know about. Maybe they tried to take him with them, but for some reason they couldn't. I don't know. I also don't know why my sister didn't try to protect me, except that I always felt like she hated me. She blamed me for our mother's death, so maybe she thought I was getting what I deserved being stuck in this house with all of this horrible stuff going on. Finally, my other sister Glenda demanded that my dad allow me to come and live with her. It was summer vacation, so I didn't have school, and I went to live with her for the summer. This left LL completely alone with the violence. By the time I returned from my sister's house at the end of the summer, LL had changed— and not in a good way. He was very angry and violent. I opened my closet to find that all of my stuffed animals and dolls had been gutted. He had taken a knife and ripped every one of them open and pulled all their insides out.
At the time, I had a gray tabby cat. I have completely blocked her name out of my mind. I only remember that she was a sweetie. It's hard for me to think of her because of what happened to her. Here I want to warn people again that there's going to be violence against an animal, horrific violence.
One day, it was the end of summer and I was back home from my sister's house. I was on our back porch and so was LL. Because it was hot and we didn't have air-conditioning, the door was opened and my dad and stepmother #1 were arguing again and you could hear them clearly through the screen door. I was on the far side of the porch and LL was sitting on the edge of the porch and digging into the dirt with a stick. My tabby cat was walking across the porch and I think she just got a little too close to LL at the wrong time. He had a habit of flying into rages at the drop of a hat, and I'm sure the argument between my dad and his mother was at least one of the catalysts for this latest flair. All I remember is that one minute he was jamming a stick into the dirt, and the next he had jumped up and grabbed my cat by her back legs. He started pounding her head into the concrete. My cat was screaming and I'll never get the sound of those screams out of my head. I stood there frozen, unable to move or speak, not believing what I was witnessing. My dad screamed from inside the screen door for him to stop, but he ignored my dad and kept going. My cat's blood and other material was spreading all over the concrete porch. After what seemed like forever, my dad finally burst through the door and grabbed LL by the shoulders and started shaking him and he dropped my cat. Unfortunately by then, she was dead. I don't remember anything about what happened after that. I wish I didn't remember that part of it. I had blocked it out until this fucking therapist brought it back up. I was much happier not remembering it.
LL had started turning his violence on me as well. He would come up behind me and start hitting me for no reason. At first I put up with it because I felt bad that I had left him alone, even though I had no choice. I had begged them to let him come with me when I went to my sisters house, but for whatever reason they wouldn't. He was stuck there alone. After a few months of him being violent toward me, one day I had enough. He came up behind me and started hitting me again for no reason and I turned on him. There was a chain that you would use to chain a dog up lying nearby and I grabbed it. I wrapped it around his neck and I shoved him up against the side of our house. He had a knife that he was waving around and I grabbed a knife and I put the tip of it right next to his eye. I got into his face and I said in the coldest, most unemotional voice that I could summon, "If you ever touch me again I swear to God I WILL KILL YOU". I then squeezed the chain around his neck until he was choking and I put the knife as close to his eye as I could without actually cutting him. Eventually, after I thought I'd gotten my message through, I released him and threw him on the ground. I then walked away. I'm normally not a violent person, but I think anyone can be pushed too far if they're continually harassed and bullied. Anyone can snap. I have glossed over and not discussed a lot of the violent things that he did to me because I don't like to talk about them, but trust me, I was pushed into this. It wasn't like I one day just decided to threaten him out of nowhere. I knew he wouldn't tell anybody about it because, to do so he would have to explain about all the harassment and violence he had been giving to me. After that day, he left me alone. It wasn't long after that day, that my dad had finally had enough. One day he told stepmother #1 that he had to go to work. Then he got in his car and drove around to a neighbor's house and parked his car behind her garage where it wouldn't be seen from the road. He then waited for my stepmother's car to drive by. Then he followed her to the motel. He waited for her to go in and then he went to the front desk and convinced the guy to take him to the room and unlock the door with the skeleton key that he had. Caught in the act, my stepmother could no longer deny what she was doing. Less than a week later, she and LL moved out of our house and divorce proceedings were started. LL went on to have many severe mental issues. He burnt down at least two different houses that he and my stepmother lived in. He was in and out of juvenile detention & the psych ward.
I haven't seen or heard from him in years and I don't really know what happened to him. The last time I saw him, I was in my very early 20s and he had calmed down and was trying to get his life together. He had gotten married and they had just had a baby girl. I hope to God he did get his life together because, if he didn't, I feel sorry for his wife and daughter and anyone else who came in contact with him. But I also feel like, if someone had just helped us when we were little, if someone had just gotten us out of that situation, particularly him because he was the only one left in the situation the entire time, maybe it could've been different. My dad was the only father that LL ever knew and the only person he would ever listen to. When he was 16, he wanted to quit school and stepmother #1 asked my dad to talk to him and convince him not to quit, which he did.
LL ended up graduating from high school, though I'm not sure what happened after that.

When my dad passed away, at his funeral this huge wreath arrived with the word "DAD" across it. None of my siblings had sent it and no one seemed to know where it came from.
I realized there was a card in it, so I took the card out and it was from LL. He might've even been at the funeral. That was yet another time that I was so out of it that I probably don't have a clear memory of much of what happened around that time. My dad was a much better father to LL than he ever was to me or any of my other siblings.

Anyway, that story encompassed a lot of stuff. It was supposed to be about my cat, but in some ways my cat was the least of the story. But that traumatic experience just became one more reason why I didn't want to own an animal. She was just an innocent animal. And I remember she was a very sweet cat, even if I can't remember her name. It seems to me her name might've been Baloo, after the bear in The Jungle Book. I know I had a gray tabby and her name was Baloo, but I don't know if it was this particular cat or a different one. I had another gray tabby named Sweetums, but that was later and it was a boy. I don't know if you get reunited with your pets if there is a heaven, but if there is, one of the first things I would do is pick her up and hold her close.

Nice story, well written. I am wondering though, this isn't an analogy to your SIL though, is it? j/k

 

[BlueWidow]

Story #4. Gretchen, My First Love

The summer between me going from the fourth grade into the fifth grade, I got my first dog that was my own. My sister had gotten two puppies and then realized that two puppies were a little too much for her, so she asked if I wanted one of them. I told her I would take one. The puppy she gave me was brown with black splotches throughout her fur. She was part dachshund, part poodle, and part wire haired terrier. Her name was Gretchen. My sister had already named her by the time I got her, so I just left her name as it was. I fell in love with Gretchen right away and she and I were inseparable. I bought her a little dog house and we placed it on the foundation where Spot's doghouse had previously stood. It wasn't as grand as his house, but I remember getting some yellow paint and painting it with little windows and flowers and a big yellow sun in the corner.
Gretchen was more than just a dog to me. I almost felt like we had a psychic connection of some kind. Anytime I was feeling low, which was a lot of the time, she seemed to intuitively know and she would come and sit next to me or put her head in my lap and look up at me with these beautiful brown eyes. She seemed to understand what I was feeling.
She and I spent the summer running around together. My niece Kristi had gotten a dog as well, a dog similar to Gretchen in that he was part terrier, only he was black and his name was Risby. Kristi and I spent the entire summer running around with Gretchen and Risby. That was probably one of the last summers that I felt really close to my niece, who is three years older than me. After that, we seemed to start drifting apart, slowly.

One morning, it was freezing cold outside and I had to leave for school. My dad had let me bring Gretchen inside because of how cold it was and she had spent the night sleeping in my bed with me. However, after I got up, she had followed me and my dad had let her outside. I was about to walk out the door to head for school when the neighbor came to the door. He told us he was very sorry, but he had just seen Gretchen run out into the highway and get hit by a car. He said he went out to see if he could do anything, but she was dead. I then had to go to school almost immediately. My first class that day was music class and we happened to be singing that day. So I spent the morning singing "The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow" from the musical Annie with tears rolling down my face.
To this day, I hate that fucking song! I only had Gretchen for 9 months, but it took me years to process and accept her death. She wasn't just a dog to me, as I said above. It wasn't like she could just be replaced with another dog and everything would go back to the way it was. I had a special connection with her. However, my dad had decided that another dog was what I needed. First of all, this was odd because anytime I wanted an animal, my dad would always tell me I couldn't have it. Of course, he would later relent and I would end up getting the animal, and then he would end up becoming almost more attached to it than I did, in some cases. And he was always complaining about any animal that I had, so it was very odd that he would want me to get another dog. Particularly when I had made clear that I didn't want another dog right away.
My dad would hear none of it and he got a friend of his to bring a dog over and told me the dog was mine. Again, I protested that I didn't want the dog, but they basically forced me to take in this dog. He was a cute dog. I'm not sure what breed he was, but he was white and fluffy. I named him Snowball because that's what he looked like, a snowball. He was a perfectly nice dog and I had nothing against him, but he wasn't Gretchen. And I had been forced to take him in, even though I didn't really want him. I needed time to mourn and I wasn't given that time. I did the best I could to take care of him, and we got along okay. He was a nice dog, but there was not that same connection that I had with Gretchen. If I had been listened to and people had allowed me the time to mourn, I'm sure I would've been very happy to have this dog because he was a sweet dog. But because of the fact that I was still mourning Gretchen, there was no way I could really connect with or love this dog the way he deserved. Again, I did the best I could to try to connect with him, but it was just no use. I'm sure he must've somehow sensed it. Dogs aren't stupid. Eventually, he started going down the street to a neighbor ladies' house and she would feed him. Not that he was hungry. I wasn't starving him or anything, but she was giving him extra food and treats. And she was at home all day, while I had to go to school. He would spend all day at her house while I was in school, and then come back to my house when I got home. One day, he was at her house and a friend of hers was there and Snowball was standing behind this man's truck in a spot where the man couldn't see him. He ended up backing over Snowball and killing him. Of course, it was very upsetting to me because Snowball never had a chance. He never had a chance to be loved properly, and I only had him for a few months before he got killed. The man came over very upset and apologizing and offering to give me another puppy and I started screaming, "No! I don't want another puppy! You can't just replace one animal with another one and think it's going to be exactly the same. Animals are living things! You can't just replace one with a different one. It's not like replacing a broken chair or something like that". Eventually, I convinced everyone to leave me alone and let me mourn and get over Gretchen's death before I got another pet. And I told my dad that I would decide when that time came, not him!
To be honest, I've never gotten over Gretchen's death, not completely. I never will.
She was the first animal I ever had a strong connection with, but not the last.
Story #5. Nathan

Sometime after Snowball died, I decided I would try a cat instead of a dog. By that time, the trauma of the way my tabby cat had died had been buried in my memory and I had suppressed it.
By this time, my dad was married to stepmother #2. She was the exact opposite of Stepmother #1 in many ways. She was big. She was overweight, but she was also very muscular. She worked as a nurse's aide in the nursing home, so she picked people up and did heavy lifting types of work on a regular basis, so she had very big muscles. However, she was also seriously overweight. She weighed about 300 pounds. She was very big and her voice was very loud. She could talk to you in her normal speaking voice, and it would sound like she was shouting at you. And heaven help you, if she actually WAS shouting at you! Her voice carried across the house. It took some time for me to get used to the idea that she wasn't actually yelling at me, but just talking to me in her regular speaking voice. Her regular speaking voice just happen to be extremely loud. When I would talk to her on the phone, I would have to hold the receiver away from my ear. And my dad was forever telling her to be quiet. However, she didn't put up with my dad's crap like the other women did. As with stepmother #1, My dad met her in a bar and she was an alcoholic as well. Both she and my dad had come out of relationships where their partner had been cheating on them and they never trusted each other right from the beginning. Anytime either one of them would see the other one speaking to someone of the opposite sex, they would fly into a rage and accuse the person of cheating. They were both paranoid. This relationship was doomed from the beginning.

I had decided to get a white cat. He was all white with beautiful blue eyes. I believe he was blind or very seriously visually impaired. Stepmother #2 scared the hell out of him because of how loud she was. Anytime she would come into the room, he would jump on her and sink his claws into her back. I suspect he felt threatened by her. To him, she must've seemed like a big, loud, moving thing and he most likely felt like she was going to do something to him. I imagine if I couldn't see her clearly and I had been in a room with her, I probably would've felt the same way.
He liked to come and sit on my shoulder.

As usual, one night my dad let him outside. . .
He was gone all night and all the next day. I went out looking for him and I couldn't find him. It was summer again, and I was sitting on the porch. It was after dark, but still hot and humid. He finally showed up and it was clear he had been fighting with another tom cat.
He was covered in blood and his ear was barely hanging. I didn't know what to do because I didn't want to touch him and hurt him. He came and sat next to me for a minute and I petted him as softly as I could so I wouldn't hurt him. He looked up at me with those beautiful blue eyes and I didn't know what to do. I told him to stay there and I would be back. I wanted someone to come and help me pick him up, so I could take him to a vet or something. However, when I got back outside, he was gone.
I think he just came home one last time to let me know what happened to him and then he went off somewhere and died alone, so that I wouldn't have to see him suffer and die.
It's funny how animals can be so much more considerate than some humans are.

Besides Nathan, I had two other cats, both of which my dad let out and they both got hit on the highway and killed.

 

[voyager]

Don't know what to say, apart from I'm sorry you, LL, and ofcourse, your cat had to go through that. It is indeed quite horrific. Domestic violence and other unpleasant experiences during childhood are a great way of messing up perfectly normal people potentially for life. It's sad, because when I remember my pets and childhood it was actually one of the best times of my life. Magical. Something every child should go through, and yet the comparatively few negative experiences I had were all involved with heated rows or violence. Like when our au pair tried to kill my great aunt with an iron bar, was 7. But my mum kicked her out and that was that. Can't imagine being exposed to such crap for years. Hope LL did indeed get on the right track again. Have someone similar in my life. He too was innoncent, but he's a mess now and we're estranged. You see the person they once were, but can't overlook what they've become.

As for pets, would be lovely to meet up with them again. Have two dogs, two cats, and a bunch of hamsters waiting for me, if that were so. Probably best not at the same time, things might get complicated...

Edit:*Just read story #4, you don't seem to catch a break. :(

 

[BlueWidow]

Story #6. Cocoa- The Final Ripping Out of My Heart

By now, I was almost 12 and had experienced one horrific incident after another with one animal after another. The carnage needed to stop, so I decided I was done with pets. I obviously wasn't meant to have one. I was sick of my heart being broken over and over and I was tired of these poor animals being put through all these horrific things, seemingly because they had been taken in by me. It wasn't just humans I've been forced to watch suffer and die throughout my life. I've had to watch one animal after another suffer and die as well. The only difference is I could make a conscious choice to never have another pet. At least, I thought I could. . .

By this point in time, my sister Glenda had been diagnosed with cancer and she was dying. I was in the beginnings of my first severe mental breakdown. I was hearing voices that were telling me to kill myself. I was very depressed and probably suicidal even though I didn't realize it.

By this time my sister Kay had gotten married and she and her husband lived in a house in a country area. They had nothing but big open fields and wooded area behind them. Beside them was another house, but it was old and abandoned. The property was owned by her husband's father. Her husband, R, was and still is a major asshole. As I said, I came from a very small town in the Midwest and most of the people there were not wealthy. Most were living paycheck to paycheck, and some not even able to do that. But my sister's husband R was from one of the more wealthy families in the area. He and his family all thought they were better than everyone else in town because they had money. He was arrogant and a know it all. It didn't matter what subject you were talking about, he always had to make sure that you knew that he knew more about it than you did. I still don't understand why my sister married him or what she saw in him. The rest of my family hated him.
So anyway they were living on this piece of property in the country, and they had all kinds of animals. They had rabbits, chickens, dogs, cats, and all other types of animals; both inside their house and outside. It wasn't a farm though, it was more like an animal sanctuary. My sister was one of these people that you could bring a stray animal to and she would take it in. She took in stray animals and stray people, anyone who was a stranger to her, she would take them in. She treated me (her own blood sister) like total shit.
But everyone thought she was so wonderful because she took in a stray animals and orphans.
Among the animals that they had were a couple of collies. One of them was a collie that looked like Lassie and his name was Prince. The other collie was black with white and brown patches in various places. Her name was Cocoa.
Again, just like with my husband, I decided that I was done becoming attached to animals because of what happened to the animals and to me when I got attached. However, Cocoa chose me. From the moment I first saw her, anytime I was at my sister's house, she followed me everywhere. She would sit next to me making sure she was pressed up against me. She would put her head in my lap and she always had to make sure she was touching me in some way. She would make these noises in her throat like she was trying to talk to me. And, once again, I felt that special connection that I had with Gretchen, only now it was even stronger with Cocoa. If I was around, she ignored every other person but me. This really annoyed R because he liked to be the center of attention and he particularly wouldn't have wanted someone to favor me over him, not even an animal. He took great delight in embarrassing me in front of people and putting me down. Anytime I was in the room, he would call Cocoa to come over to him and he would get very mad when she would ignore him and stayed next to me. He was desperate to prove to me that Cocoa liked him way more than she liked me. Never mind that all these other animals were his and they all paid attention to him. He wanted the one animal that was paying attention to me to start ignoring me, so that he could make me feel like shit. However, it never worked. Eventually, they decided that Cocoa had claimed me as her own and told me that I should take her home with me.
However, considering the track record that I had, I was afraid to do so because I knew she would just go out and get hit along the highway when my dad let her out when I wasn't around to protect her. I resisted bringing her home with me, thinking I was keeping her safe by keeping her at my sister's house where she could be out in the country and run around and not be in danger of getting hit by a car.
I visited her as much as I could, but I refused to take her home with me because I wanted her to be safe. Saying goodbye was always a sad affair. It would break my heart to say goodbye to her, and she would look at me and I would swear sometimes that she had tears in her eyes. I stayed with her as much as I could, even though it meant I had to be around R.
Time went on and my sister Glenda eventually got sick and died, and I had a nervous break down and was put in the psych ward. I became a ward of the state and I got to see Cocoa less and less. Then one day, my sister told me that Cocoa, along with many of their other animals, had been poisoned because her husband had gotten into a fight with a neighbor down the street. Apparently they had been fighting for several months and the neighbor came in the middle of the night and put some kind of poison out for her animals and a bunch of them ate it and died.
I have no doubt her husband was probably just being an arrogant asshole and somebody just got sick of it. I just wish they hadn't decided to take it out on the animals.

At that point, I was done. I decided no more pets. Since then I've had no pets, except for the squirrels in my backyard at the place where I previously lived. Now I don't even have the squirrels because I have no trees in my yard where I currently live, and squirrels upset me now because they remind me of my husband. So now I'm left with nothing.

People keep urging me to get a pet and telling me that it will help me get over my husband's death. First of all, I don't think getting over someone's death is a good reason to get a pet, especially when you can't hardly even take care of yourself. How am I going to take care of a pet when I can barely get out of bed half the time? Besides which, I just don't need the hassle or the heartache. It's just easier to be alone at this point. But I still love animals and I enjoy playing with animals when I go to other people's houses who have them.
I just feel like I was meant to be alone. That's what the universe seems to be telling me because it has taken away everything that I love until I have nothing left.

 

[Deleted member 1465]

Wow you've had some rough luck with pets.
Thanks for the stories
I know what you mean though. The bond you share with a pet is very special.
When I was growing up my dog was my best friend. We just knew what each other was thinking. He'd come and sit beside me if I was down and just keep me company.
He'd sit in the window when I left for uni and he'd be in the same window when I'd come back months later! Ofc he hadn't been sitting there all that time but it looked like it.
I always regret that I wasn't there when he died, but he had a great life and was put to sleep peacefully.
Now I find that all dogs seem to love me whether I like it or not!

 

[Broken Chimera]

You just can't catch a break. You've suffered too many losses in life. I'm sorry. But I have to agree with Underscore. You could become a writer and be great at it.

 

[BlueWidow]

Story #2. The Fancy Dog House

As I said above, by the time I was one, my family had moved to a house in town. My dad was an avid hunter and he always had hunting dogs, but there was one particular dog that was his favorite. The dog's name was Spot. I am remembering all this from the point of view of an extremely small child, so I'm just going to tell you what I remember and it may or may not be completely accurate. This is just what I remember from being very young. Spot was a mixed breed dog. He was white with black patches all over his body. He had one black patch over his right eye, and several black patches all over his body, and his tail was black, with the exception of the tip which was white. He was a mixture of different hound breeds, such as basset hound, Beagle, and bloodhound. He may have had some other breeds mixed in too because I remember him being fairly tall, but I don't know if he actually was tall, or if that was just my perception of him because of how small I was at the time. I seem to remember him having some pointer mixed in as well though.
Again, he was my dad's pet, but he was also a hunting dog. My dad said he was the best hunting dog he ever owned. My dad treated Spot like a king. This was back in the 1970s when people didn't spoil their pets the way they do today. But Spot had his own dog house, and it was no ordinary dog house.
There were two steps leading up to the foundation of the house, and it was a two-story doghouse. It was so big that, as a small child, I could go in there and play inside it. It sort of doubled as a playhouse for me, as well as a doghouse for Spot. But the most extraordinary thing about it was that the floor on the bottom level was heated. There was some kind of generator hooked up to it or something. I don't know exactly how they heated the floor, but in the winter I could go in there and play and be warm. They later did the exact same thing in an episode of King of the Hill, where Hank built Ladybird a doghouse that had heated flooring.
Unfortunately, Spot got hit by a car on the road beside our house. On one side of our house was a side road, which is the one that Spot got killed on, and I later had a dog get killed on. On the other side of our house, was a busy highway, where many of my pets died because my dad kept letting them out of the house, and they would all run out into the highway and get hit. Anyway, Spot got hit on the side road next to our house. My dad was just crushed. Spot's doghouse stood empty for about a year after he died, and then my dad eventually sold it to somebody and it was taken away. However, the foundation with the two steps going up to it remained, A reminder of where Spot's house used to be. My dad never got another hunting dog after Spot. It also wasn't too long after Spot died that my mom also died. My dad hunted after that, but not nearly as often as he had before those two events.

Additional Insight: After thinking about this story, I just wanted to clarify something because it's bothering me. Nobody will probably even care about it, but I wanted to make sure I clarified it for whoever reads it in the future when I'm not here. I've stated in other threads on here that my first memory is of being at my mother's funeral, and that's true. When I refer to this story and the story above it, I just wanted to make it clear that a lot of the things I'm referring to are not direct memories of mine, but are of things that I've been told happened and references from old photos. I wish I had the energy and the motivation to go through my pictures and pull a few of them out because I would put them on here if I did. Pictures that wouldn't really have many identifying markers to them, that is. But sadly that's one of the things that I'm probably not going to be able to do before I go because I just can't get up the energy or the ability to think clearly enough to figure out where all my photos are, gather them all up, and go through them. Right now they're probably all scattered about in various different boxes and such from when I moved in 2018 to where I am now.
Anyway, I did want to clarify again though that in these first two stories the things that happened were related to me through older family members and pictures. I have very vague flashes of being in Spot's doghouse, but they aren't clear memories, they're just flashes. I was probably 2 or just barely 3 when I played in his dog house.
Spot died in very late summer or early Fall. My mother died the following February, on my father's 44th birthday. I was 3 at the time of my mother's death, but only 4 months away from turning 4 years old. My first clear memory is of being at her funeral, and I've described that in another thread, so I'm not going to go into it here. I just wanted to make that clear for anyone who didn't understand or was confused by me referring to my mother's funeral as my first memory, but then telling stories about things that happened before that in a way that perhaps makes it seem like I remember them.
Also, I referenced the King of The Hill episode and I wanted to make clear that the heat in Spot's doghouse wouldn't have been anything like that. I just used it as a reference so people would understand what I was talking about. I believe my dad probably hooked some kind of heater up to a generator for the dog house or something. I don't think it was on all the time. They probably mostly ran it on cold nights and during the day if it was cold and I was in the doghouse playing. And it would've been something that my dad put together himself. It wouldn't have been anything that he bought at a store. This was the very early 1970s, so I don't even know if they would've had anything like that that you could buy in a store. It was probably made out of things that my dad found at the junkyard and the dump. When I was very young, and before he became a complete alcoholic, every Sunday we took a trip to the junkyard and the dump and we would go through and my dad would pick stuff out to take back home and he would then build stuff out of whatever he found.
So he probably rigged the heater in Spot's dog house out of pieces he found at the dump & the junkyard.
I just wanted to clarify those points.