The pets I have known
By Margery McCurdy Plummer

Today I was thinking of the pets we have owned. All have lived long and loving lives, so there haven’t been as many over the years as one might think.

The first ones in my memory were bull dogs, vicious looking and sweet as could be. The first one, Lady, presented us with three little puppies. My father let friends have them. One of the dogs was a “throw-out”, too large for the breed and with a personality somewhat different. Pancho was given back to us by its owner, a man from Arizona who owned Arizona Ranch House a restaurant where the White House Paint Store is now located. The reason that he was returned was the “he was too rough for the children.” Pancho and Lady (his mother) spent most of their lives in loving companionship, much of the time in the drugstore.

Our next dog was a beautiful Eskimo Spitz, the only dog we had ever bought. She lived to be an old lady, dying of congestive heart failure.

My sister, knowing that I was foolishly soft-hearted about animals, brought me one she had found abandoned in a ditch. We had him for a long time until, knowing that his life near an end, he went into a field and died. Animals do that sometimes.

And there was Rex and a few others, not to mention Sheeba, who died at 18 years of age a couple of years ago, nearly breaking our hearts. Skippy, we think about 2 years of age is indescribable.

At one point, we became literally overrun with cats and kittens, cute but not permanent. Fortunately, we found them good homes catching mice in a commercial chicken house and a smoke house.

I had never known much about rabbits when I visited a home where beautiful, furry white rabbits were kept. I was allowed to keep one, and after getting a pen for it to stay in, I decided that it needed a little more freedom occasionally. I took a cloth belt from a summer dress, and short periods of the day, would allow it with the “collar” to be led around and graze. This worked for some time, then one day the belt loosened, I turned my head, and my rabbit hopped away–hopefully, I thought, to find a home and playmates.

My license plate reads “Animal Friendly”, but chickens are not animals. They’re fowl, and I don’t feel badly about not being crazy about them. But when my father got a small flock of them, I didn’t complain. There was a little hen house behind the garage attached there by former tenants. I don’t know whether the chicken raising was one of Daddy’s experiments. At any rate, I didn’t like to see them walking around stretching their necks and listening to the crowing of Red Rooster, their companion.

We kept our flock of fowl for a while, then Red, who was not really young, started showing signs of age. His feet (or claws) were tender, and he had trouble getting down from the roost. When Daddy started having to go out and lift Red down from his perch, I think that he was embarrassed and just gave them to friends. We enjoyed eggs, but never killed a hen. It’s been many years since I’ve eaten any chicken. I’m not sure why, I just don’t, and only memory has the answer.