My Animal Companion

[Crow Boy]

I am not sure if this has been done before but if so I can't find the forum so am making one of my own.

Some time ago I was typing with Mig16 and it made me think about my furry friends. The one if the photo is a special little guy. He is a ferret and at the time he was the last thing I needed in my life.

I was going through a very difficult divorce and was at about the lowest point in my life. I had lost everything around me and suddenly I got Ben.

I used to be a volunteer for animal rescue and used to end up with lots of odd animals in my life. Ben was an abandoned or lost ferret trying to survive in the streets of Sydney. He was captured in a cage trap by pest controllers and taken to the RSPCA. He isn't their typical animal so they called the Ferret Association and asked if they could/would care for him. One of them called me and said "Hi - I have an undesexed male ferret approximately two years old, he is covered in fleas, stinks, is uncontrollable, and the RSPCA want to put him down" "You want him?"

Over the years I have had quite a few ferrets and they are quirky pets - not the usual house animal and they need to be taken care of differently to a normal companion animal.

Ben was taken to my house and we had to establish a few house rules - the most important one is BITING is bad. Ferrets bite and have extremely sharp teeth that can cause a very nasty bite. As soon as I took hold of him he bit me on the back of my hand. Ferrets are dominance animals and so I did the only thing you can do in this situation which is I took the flap of skin on the back of his neck and bit him back until after about 3 or 4 minutes of us drawing blood from each other he suddenly fell limp. This is a signal that he had given up. They make out they are dead. After that he only bit me once in anger and I did it again - looked a bit odd because at the time he was in the vet's office after he got a couple of painful needles but wasn't a good enough reason for me.

Ben was meant to stay with me only until he was socialised and taken to a new family but we tried twice to set him up in a new home and he nearly destroyed their house looking for me to come and take him back.

He loved to ride on my motorbike - stuffed down the front of my shirt with he head poking out and he went to work with me most Fridays. He became a very loving and gently creature much to the surprise of everyone who saw him in the first weeks.

He loved potato chips and was a beer pig - leave a beer on the table unguarded and he would dive head first into it until dragged out. He liked chocolate but it made him fart and would demolish a bag of licorique but it did horrible things to his bowels.

Benny lived with me and helped me when I was having a really bad time, finally after five years I woke up to find he had quietly died on under the pillow in my bed where he slept every night.

He was a special character and one I miss to this day - he was the last pet I had before I came back to Thailand and he lives in a very special place in my heart.

Miss you little guy

This is Benny

So how about you - who is the special companion animal in your life and why, what's their story?

cheers

CB

[MiG16]

Dear CB

thanks for sharing this lovely story and Beny's cutie pic with us

Julie's story:

Julie came to live with us when she was still a tiny little baby, I still remember having to feed her milk out of a bottle in those days A few months later my cousin was born....so in some way they kinda grew up together.

Almost impossible to tell her story here, since she lived with us for 20.5 years

but in summary she grew from a small baby girl, to a teenager...at which time my brother and I had grown out of our early teens....so she got the status of my brother's daughter and I was put in this dilemma of a stage where to me Julie was a sister...but somehow I had been made an aunt

at one point Julie even had her own little pups.....was quite funny to see that though...cos she was obviously not used to taking care of others....we had to buy those specialised dog milk powder for the pups cos Julie didnt have enough milk for them.....and from this dog who most of her life didnt enjoy drinking milk...she was suddenly almost fighting the pups for some milk too

but she did also have some mother instinct....she was never a barking dog, except for those few months when she had those pups

what I recall from her younger days was how we shared our food (well I shared mine hehe....I didnt start eating her dog food)

her fav was cheese amongst other things. she was somewhat of a lazy dog even in her younger days, but the only time she would jump and be active is when she wanted cheese we enjoyed many similar things, including a lot of sweets...but surprisingly...not that big into chocolates

anyhow next thing we knew Julie had gotten older than us. at 20.5 human years that would make her old enough to be our grandmother she died last June and I still miss her very very much especially since the last few days that Im home. last time I visited home she was already very old and needed constant hand-feeding amongst other things. that kept me busy making sure she ate her 2 or 3 tiny meals, and a few minutes of walk, and cleaning her skin, infected eye, infected ears etc etc. now I feel like I have too much time left on my hands....and that makes me miss her even more

so thats Julie's and our story

PS. sorry no pic on this comp!

[Crow Boy]

Dear CB

thanks for sharing this lovely story and Beny's cutie pic with us

Julie's story:

anyhow next thing we knew Julie had gotten older than us. at 20.5 human years that would make her old enough to be our grandmother she died last June and I still miss her very very much especially since the last few days that Im home. last time I visited home she was already very old and needed constant hand-feeding amongst other things. that kept me busy making sure she ate her 2 or 3 tiny meals, and a few minutes of walk, and cleaning her skin, infected eye, infected ears etc etc. now I feel like I have too much time left on my hands....and that makes me miss her even more

so thats Julie's and our story

PS. sorry no pic on this comp!

Thanks MiG16 - I was showing some of the people at work the photos of the ferrets and they had no idea what one so there was a bit of confusion as to how big they are. My little one Zoe was tiny - 25cm from tip of nose to end of tail. Ben was HUGE he measured 60cm but he was very gentle with her, well most of the time anyway. Ferret play can be really rough with lots of squeels and squeeks as they bite each other.

More photos attached - please put some photos of Julie on the 'puter I would love to see her.

They like to sleep in my clothes so they are curled up in a pair of my sweatpants looking innocent.

Ferrets are normally very secretive and the photo of Benny flat on his back was taken after he fell asleep on my lap when I was watching TV, I put him down on the couch when I went to make a cup of coffee and he had ended up in this position. He must have felt safe.

The last one is of Zoe dragging a leg of lamb bone from the kitchen into the lounge room where she intended on eating it inside my lounge - she was heartily miffed when I kept dragging her out and eventually gave up and ate it on the floor near me instead. Every time I took her and the bone back to the kitchen to eat it there she would drag it back again so it was a compromise.

CB

[MiG16]

they sound cute

pics will have to wait a couple of weeks....not on my own comp for a while but will post my pic on another thread as requested by Kayo....just found a good pic

[MiG16]

ok heres one pic of Julie....

I think she was either 17 or maybe 18, or well somewhere around there

notice how her forefeet are all brown/black? she got to the point where even right after a bath she was no longer 'white' and she had this amazing ability to get herself dirty right after a bath

and the hair covering her eyes? tried as we did, cut it as short as we did, push it as far back as we could, and again somehow..she would always manage to pull them down to cover her eyes. perhaps that was main reason why one of her eye got quite infected...and i think in her very late stage might have developed into cataract.

in her 20 years, she had one operation...was around 16 or 17 I think. after that operation she turned into this lively young thing for a while. at that point I kinda thought she would live forever that forever lasted another almost 4 years...not too bad I suppose..

miss you heaps my darlin

[princealbert]

My bestest pal cheeky chappy Charlie the cockatoo 1 year old next month.

Better looking and much smarter than me fluent in Thai and English he is teaching me lots of new tricks and a little Thai too

Edited April 16, 2007 by princealbert