Diane Rusch Zinn, My One-Liner on Multi-Pets

Bridger and Zeb

 

Our family life with pets began in 1966 when we adopted a foundling long-haired cat that we named Kiki, after a character in a book series that daughter Lauri (age 4) liked.  Kiki was with us for 14 years and gave birth to 59 beautiful long-haired kittens.  Whenever she was about to deliver, neighbor kids came down to watch the process.  What a good education!  We never had any trouble finding good homes for any of them.

Subsequent cats included Cribbles because she had a crooked tail, Sherbet because he was orange, and Teva, because of the popularity of the sandal at the time.

But hunting dogs reigned in our household.  From our first, a Brittany spaniel we named Sniffy because he had his nose to the ground all the time, to our latest, Duchess, a yellow Lab, the tally is 17 in all.  As a gift to Dick for his 60th birthday, I applied pictures of 14 of those dogs to the tile bordering his bathroom counter.

Our first Lab was Zeb, named for Zebulon Pike because Dick made up bedtime stories for Lauri and Rob about him.  Our second Lab, Zeb’s son, was black and named Bridger, after the Bridger Mountains near our place in Bozeman MT.  One white English pointer we named Winnie because as a pup her face resembled Winston Churchill.

Through the kids’ growing up years, they hosted a menagerie of creatures.  The big one was Cleopatra, Rob’s nine-foot Boa.  He also caught snapping turtles and tried to keep them in a huge washtub, but they always escaped.  The kids rescued injured squirrels and birds, too.   One bird that Rob brought home had fallen from its nest at Dillon’s; he named it John Dean Bird.  It was the Watergate era.  Becky and Jenni nursed an injured squirrel back to health, then released it down by the creek behind our house.

Naturally, many of these creatures didn’t make it, so make way for the neighborhood funeral processions.  The kids committed most of them to an ample burial area behind our property.