Favorite pets

[Number Six]

What type of pets do you have or like? I have couple canaries, purchased from a hair dresser locally who raises and sells them and are of higher quality than pet shops. They are acceptable according to my housing rental agreement. They are low maintenance and sing, nice and happy.

What pets do you have and enjoy?

[JohnPCapitalist]

What type of pets do you have or like? I have couple canaries, purchased from a hair dresser locally who raises and sells them and are of higher quality than pet shops. They are acceptable according to my housing rental agreement. They are low maintenance and sing, nice and happy.

What pets do you have and enjoy?

One 15-pound Chihuahua mix. Sweet, polite, sincere, but like Woody Allen in canine form (minus the child predator part).

One 80-pound "bernadoodle" puppy (stepdaughter's dog). Half Bernese Mountain Dog and half standard poodle. Basically, a cute and empty-headed floor mop. The Bernadoodle is a complete snow fiend, leaping and romping and rolling in the snow every time he goes out. We went snowshoeing at the height of the storm on Sunday instead of watching the Super Bowl, and he got tons of snow sticking to his undercarriatge, and made a huge mess in the car on the way back. He was ludicrously happy, though.

I'm in Fairfield County, BTW. Hail, fellow Nutmeg Stater!

[Pottapaug1938]

I've never had a pet; but if I did, it would be a cat -- I've always loved them. I know some fantastic dogs; and the dog who lives next door goes crazy when she sees me; but I would prefer to have a cat.

[AnOwlCalledSage]

One big fluffy furball machine. Only downside is that she demands her kitty treats at 4am every day, or else I get "the claw".

I too quite like dogs, but they are like nephews and nieces. Fun for a day out, but you are glad someone else has to look after them!

[JamesVincent]

I've had cats my whole life. Occasionally we had dogs and I've had a few since I've been an adult but prefer cats over them. Over the years I've had birds, hamsters, you name it. My favorite outside of cats would have to be ferrets.I had a horse a long, long time ago but living and working on my uncle's dairy farm fixed me for life of ever wanting anything else considered livestock.

[Duke2Earl]

50 pound rescue pooch here. A great dog.

[eric]

I've always been of the opinion that my favorite pet(s) is whatever I have right now. Chilliano the Mexican wonder dog (a whippet/black lab cross rescue) is at my feet and Maria the cat is somewhere (my neighbours call her my supervisor since she follows me when I'm working outside). Max, a purebred standard schnauzer, is following his genetics and is outside in the yard looking for a small animal to kill. The fact that it's minus 35C right now doesn't seem to bother him. Call me a suck but I actually have portraits painted by a friend of all three.

[Dark Optimist]

We had a dog - good old 'merican mutt mix of black lab, maybe greyhound and some others. Wonderful dog, but very territorial - he would bark whenever a neighbor would walk their dog to the park by our house. We had to put him down about 5 years ago due to health issues.

Our next dog was two cats. One is a Calico (Mary) and the other is a white Aegean (Lincoln). He is mellow. She is nuts. Mary is very loving, but Calico's are notorious for being crazy, so be careful.

All came from a shelter. Always the only place to get an animal from.

[eric]

Sometimes we do the rescue bit, sometimes it seems we just sort of end up with an animal. Had a jack russell that was just a laneway drop off (welcome to living in the country). Our schnauzer was a mistake that wasn't supposed to happen when someone didn't notice that his two bitches were both in heat and a friend came to visit with his own dog.

[Number Six]

There is a lot of variety here in terms of what people like or find comfortable with. I had a family dog once that I was picked up at a shelter and was an enthusiastic family member. I liked the Long Trail in Vermont with her.

The canary pet hobby started when an older sister who has lived in the Canary Islands since the 70s actually got away with smuggling one of the birds into the US foolishly, customs did not look in the case where it was hidden.

I would think that the least trouble are fish in an aquarium.

[AndyK]

I live with Lula, a Japanese Chin. Classic lap dog.

[JamesVincent]

I would think that the least trouble are fish in an aquarium.

For awhile the kids and I had a pretty large aquarium with just a plecto and two soft shell turtles that my son had caught in the river near our house. Easiest thing in the world. Drop some food in for the turtles and the plecto ate the algae and crud they generated. Also was a lot of fun to watch.

[The Observer]

Currently we have 9 cats. This was not intended or planned; we originally had one indoor cat that adopted us as a stray (to this day we only refer to her as "Kitty" since we had no idea of what her name is). When we moved to our Fortress of Solitude in the Pacific Northwest several years ago, we got hold of a neutered feral cat for our barn due to the fact that our property was overrun with voles; we did name him ("Barney", naturally). And that is where we said, "no more."

But that plan went out the window in October. I was puttering around the outbuildings on our property and removed a tarp that had been covering an old horse water trough. To my surprise a cat leaped out of there and took off around the corner. Looking in the trough, I saw 6 newborn kittens (about 10 days old was my guess due to their eyes opening). I thought Mama kitty was a feral cat as well since we had never seen her slinking around on the property. But she returned within 30 minutes or so and was in the process of moving the kittens out of the trough into a corner of the lean-to where the trough was located. Another surprise in store was that Mama was very approachable and in about 30 seconds crawled into my arms and started purring. I realized at that point the battle was lost since I had been adopted. Kittens were moved back into the trough and Mama was given quite a few meals to get some weight on her since she was skin and bones. She turned out to be an excellent mother and was soon bringing the kittens voles and gophers to eat, not that they had any idea of what to do with these meals at first - the gophers were bigger than any of the kittens.

We later moved them into an indoor setting in our shop building due to the drop of temperatures. Mama is her official name now and the kittens have been named as well:

1) Bear - a calico tabby female, nice fluffy coat and unofficial second mother to the rest of the litter

2) Squeaks - a silver tabby female, who was the first kitten to attempt communicating with us with sounds that were more rodent than feline

3) Tigger - a dark tabby female with bold tabby stripe markings

4) and 5) Chips and Dale - at first it was "Chip and Dale" since we couldn't tell these two tabby females apart; but their constant sitting on their hindquarters stood out and my wife remarked on their resemblance to chipmunks. Later on this morphed into "Chip or Dale", as in "was that Chip or Dale that just bit my ankle?" As they have grown more we have finally figured out who is who.

6) Badger - a mackerel tabby and the only male of the bunch. He is the proverbial 500 pound gorilla on the block and outweighs his sisters by twice, but he has restrained from bullying them and keeps his play gentle. However with us, that rule does not apply, and he loves nothing better than running up the back of our legs and spine to our shoulders to sit there like a parrot on a pirate's shoulder.

We have plans to get them all spayed or neutered in the next few weeks since we do not want the process to repeat itself. By spring they will be outside terrorizing Gophertown on our property and the farmer's field next door to us as well as eradicating what is left of the voles.

[Arthur Rubin]

As far back as I can remember, my parents had a pair of Siamese cats.

We've had cats, either abandoned or inherited, since around 1998. Currently, only have one calico cat (inherited), which we named Spot. My wife had cats, dogs, and budgerigars. (I think that's the spelling.)

We had 3 semi-feral cats in Phoenix. (There was a fourth feral cat, but he had FIV or FeLu, and had to be put down.) I think we did a catch, neuter, and release on 2 others.

We then got a cat that was abandoned at our vet, inherited one from a resident of an assisted care facility my wife was in, and inherited two from a friend (60s) who died shortly after her husband died of complications of diabetes.

[Judge Roy Bean]

Not too many years ago we finally decided pets (actually, the loss of them) was too much to have to deal with. Thus, in 2017, for the first time in over 45 years we had no cats or dogs and we don't have to worry about what will happen to them if we need to go somewhere. (In two cases we had came home to dead pets.) And we don't have to go through the trauma of putting them down after spending absurd amounts on emergency room visits.

[Cathulhu]

I grew up on a farm; I generally get along with animals. At present, we just have the original Cathulhu, now almost 19 years old. We think she's a bit elderly to have other cats around, but when spouse's very elderly father leaves us, we've sworn to him we'll take his little tabby. Since both Dad and I qualified for and got our first covid shots this past week, we're hoping this will not be for a long time yet.

Although to be honest, she actually answers to Lulu or Tyranicat, Empress of the Universe.

[BoomerSooner17]

My avatar is my late Australian Shepherd, Winchester. He passed in November 2019 at 13 years old. We now have a liver-and-white Brittany named Cooper.

[Duke2Earl]

I have had both cats and dogs. I have also kept fish but don't really regard them as pets. Currently, we have a rescue dog named Gracie. She is my therapy dog and at my age and condition I need quite a bit of that. Numerous studies show that people with pets live longer and I'm in favor of that. If anything unexpected happened to us, our kids would be glad to keep her with their own pets.

[Dr. Caligari]

We've had labradoodles since 2000 (one or two at a time; 3 all told, 2 now dead). Phoebe, the surviving doodle, is going to be 7 years old in two weeks.