I’ve been working with animals all my life, for the most part. Even when it wasn’t my job, people would call me for advice about their animals or simply ask for my opinion. When I was twelve or so, I found a litter of baby Cottontails in the yard of a neighbor who had long since moved away, leaving the yard overgrown with weeds. The six bunnies were screaming for hours before I found them, and I took them home and bottle-fed them, raising four of the six to adulthood before setting them free, despite the adults around me telling me that baby bunnies could not survive losing their mother.
My mother used to tell people I was going to be a veterinarian when I grew up. It wasn’t what I wanted, though. It was just what I did. I think I related better to animals than I did to other humans, and animals were forgiving, accepting. When the situation was right, they were even loving.
At eighteen, I found myself gifted with a three day-old African Lion and being told I needed to raise him. It was a challenge that I was a bit daunted by, but I accepted it, and as he grew; “Tiger” developed a loyalty to me that few friends had shown.
A few years later, I had mastered the art of bottle-feeding animals, and when Wiley (what else would one name a Coyote pup?) came into my life, I was working more than full time and feeding him on a two-hour schedule. My husband was supposed to feed him while I worked, but each day, when I arrived home, Wiley was screaming for me. Frustrated, I would tell B exactly how to hold the bottle, and the pup, and he would swear to me that he would do it just that way.
Finally, after two weeks of being met at the end of my work day by a howling baby coyote, I insisted that B show me how he was trying to feed Wiley, so I could show him what he was doing wrong.
He did it perfectly, and Wiley would have none of it. Terrified that something was wrong with my baby, I took him from B and took the bottle, offering it to him as I always did.
He took it eagerly, from me. And so I became his mother, as well.
Somewhere along the way, my brothers blessed me with a feral cat. I don’t know what they thought I should do with a feral cat, but they said they found him and thought of me. “Bill,” as I called him, was mean as a snake, and got trapped in my front porch. He couldn’t get out unless he showed himself, and therefore, he spent weeks … perhaps months … in my porch, where he would attack me as I entered the house, shredding my jeans or my kneecaps with his claws. I patiently fed him daily and changed his litter.
And one day, I guess he decided I was all right, after all. He accepted me. He wanted to come inside the house and from there, he took over the household and my heart.
That was the start of something wonderful, that being my lifelong love for felines. After Bill, came Scapegoat, Wendy, Mark, Bambi, Effie, Scamper-Cat … and later, S.T., Fido, Chopper, Chimer, Frank, and Levi.
I began working with animals full-time in 1987 and always loved it. I loved cats most of all, and time after time, I would have cat “owners” tell me that their cat was better with me than with anyone else. We always seemed to understand each other, I guess.
I adopted Eve in 1989, and Byron in 1991. Peggy Sue found her way to me in 1993.
Eve and Byron both died in 2001, and after that, it was just Peggy, until Josh wiggled and snorted her way into my heart in 2002.
