We have owned cats for many years and they have usually lived inside. We still have a couple that have never stepped outside. But for the past two years we seem to have become a dropping off point for unwanted cats and kittens.

Cats are definitely cool. They entertain themselves, they eliminate many pests including mice and snakes, and they can exhibit extreme love — on occasion — when it suits them.

We have had some of the most loving cats anyone could find. And we have had a couple that — like humans — had severe mental problems. One Siamese in particular was really psychotic. She could be sitting somewhere watching something and suddenly go berserk.

Most tame cats are basically lazy but they provide a lot of entertainment and the companionship that many of us need.  One can’t help but be amused at the antics cats do by themselves or to each other.

Our outside cats don’t worry about entertaining us. They just line up for food every morning and evening and mostly disappear in between. Of course, if there is a new litter of kittens they will stay close and as soon as they can walk and run, they will be underfoot trying to play with your shoe laces, their own or another cat’s tail and just generally enjoying life.

The kittens usually get along pretty well with the older cats but sometimes an older cat wlll take exception to the kitten just being there and with a few swats let the youngster know to move on. They do — with no hard feelings and the next time they meet they are friends again.

We can learn a lot from our animals.

When we first got chickens and let them roam about the yard the cats were quite curious but their curiosity vanished after the chickens showed them what beaks can do. The only time we have to watch the cats now is if there are baby chicks around, but again, the mother hen will pretty well take care of her brood.

And that mother hen will protect the chicks from the other chickens, dogs, people, snakes or anything else she perceives as a threat. It doesn’t matter how big — if they get too close to the little ones they are going to suffer punctures from a sharp beak wielded by an angry mother.

Once upon an eternity, God was looking at his creations and saw that the men and women on earth needed something else. They needed something to keep them focused on “right and wrong” and something to care about other than themselves.

He considered lots of ways to guide them. Of course he could simply assign an angel to each person but if he did that the angels might lose some of their magical appeal and the mortal men and women wouldn’t be helped as much as he wanted to help them.

So as he was watching the humans go about their daily routines he suddenly thought “They each need a special something to capture their attention and teach them about love.”
And that was when he created his “special angels” that came to be known as dogs — and sometime later — he added cats.

Dogs were first and God told them to be faithful and friendly to the men and women and that the men and women would be good to them. “Be faithful and friendly and remember that they think they are supposed to take care and watch over you, but you will know that you are really taking care of them,” God told the dogs.

And the dogs welcomed their assignment and were free and fearless because they were God’s special representatives.

So the dogs were placed with the men and women and their friendships grew and grew. Everyone got along very well together with just a few exceptions but no one ever knew the true identity and purpose of the dogs. It was just a much appreciated and mutual love between animal and human.

And some very special events happened as the result of the “special angels” vigilance and care for their human “subjects.”

This blog is intended to tell the stories of some of the animals in our lives in recent years and how they have been treated and mistreated by their earthly friends and how they are such great examples of forgiveness and eternal love.

And I will look forward to hearing your stories and comments and seeing your pictures.

When the pups got bigger they decided the woods should be thoroughly explored and enjoyed. So they wound up with heavy collars with their name and our phone number burned into them.

It wasn’t unusual for them to be gone for a full day and once in a while a night if something had needed chasing.

The big hound, Number One, was a great hunter but the opossums tested his mental prowress with their ability to “play dead” when they sensed danger. On one occasion when I went looking for Number One I found him asleep in the woods with his nose about a foot from a young possum that was playing dead.

Another time he was gone for three days and then someone called and said “Your dog is at my house.” Their house was about seven miles from ours but hound dog that he was he chased a deer so far he forgot how to get home. Thank goodness my wife had put our phone number on his collar. We retrieved him and he slept for two days.

In addition to the deer in the woods we also had a small black panther that was spotted several times. The vet said it isn’t unusual for them to range over an area of 15 or more miles and we knew it wasn’t dangerous unless it had a baby with it.

MarMar must have found it one day because he came home much the worse for wear. He had claw scratches all across his body and a bite mark that was on both sides of his neck. A couple of trips to the vet and he was roaming again.

The next time he arrived home from a bad experience I suspected an alligator attack. Something large enough to span his shoulders with teeth did some serious damage and one side of his body was almost skinned, with the skin hanging and dragging.

Of course it happened on a weekend and the nearest emergency vet was 50 miles away. The lady vet stitched him up and put in some drain tubes that had to remain for awhile but he healed nicely and was ready to go again.

That experience did convince him that he didn’t like the creek near the house or river where we had a camp or any body of water. But we then ended their roaming days and put up a fence that more or less kept them in. More or less because they would climb and jump over if they could and dig under if necessary. Eventually an electric fence did a marvelous job of keeping them in.

All during their younger years there were no cats around. But with middle age came change – and new learning experiences.

But let me interject in the next post a story I recently wrote about dogs and I would love to hear your comments. But first here is another Mark Twain utterance: Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

The stray dog saga continued the next morning when I stepped out of the back door of our “raised” house and the two dogs came from under the house to greet me – hungrily.

They were a pitiful sight. The one that had been in the pool turned out to be a cross between a Sharpei and probably Shephard. She had an eye missing and the socket was oozing. Her brown and black fur was long and wiry.

Peepeye, the swimming pool dog

The other had shorter yellow hair, a broken leg and one ear torn off.

I spoke an edict to the family about not feeding them so they would go wherever they were supposed to be. On the second day they spoke their answer to me by going to the woods and coming back with a rabbit and opossum. I guess the bringing it back part was to tell me they would gladly share since we apparently didn’t have any food.

Needless to say, they stayed. The vet bills were not too bad and it was a lesson in caring to watch the yellow dog keep licking the oozing eye while ignoring the splint on her broken leg.

It didn’t take long for them to convince us we couldn’t do without them so they were named and became “first outside pets.”

They got along fine with my inside-dwelling male toy poodle so they became known as Peepeye and Vanny van Gogh.

As it turned out, Vanny was pregnant and before long we had nine small pups of every shade and description. Some were black and brown like shephards, a couple were ringers for yellow labs, the rest were more mixed looking and the two adopted girls were very happy to be together and with two new families.

Another trip to the vet as soon as permissible assured no more additions by either girl and the pups were adorable and hilarious to watch. A washing machine box with the top half cut off was their happy home as they grew to weaning age.

It was no problem finding good homes for them. The problem was how to respond to “I want to keep that yellow one” and “I want to keep Number One.”

So – we wound up with two puppies. The one called Number One had been born first so he had the original easy name. There was no mistaking him for a lab or shephard, he was pure Walker Hound.

The yellow one became MarMar and has outlasted all of them despite the many ordeals he has survived through those 14 years.

Next we’ll recall some of the river and woods critters.

This collection of animals in the yard began about 14 years ago shortly after we moved to our almost-rural three acres. (Almost rural because we are three miles from our local community and 35 miles from both Baton Rouge and New Orleans.)

The house we moved into was built in 1835 or so and had been added to and remodeled so it was a historical house with all the good amenities like insulation, good wiring, modern plumbing, new septic system and a great 500-foot deep flow well.

The yard has parallel rows of trees with a variety of oaks, pines, pecans and dogwoods and tall, old stands of crepe myrtles nearer the front and rear of the house itself. Interspersed with those trees are many, many varieties of japonica camellias and sasanquas so something is blooming almost all winter.

Since our three acres had been carved out of an edge of what had been a large farm and the rest of the acreage had not been farmed for years, we were almost surrounded by nice, dense forest. But 200 yards from the house is an interstate highway that proved convenient for us because our business before we sold it kept us on the road across the Gulf South.

In the front yard is a concrete swimming pool that was built in the 1930s. It is only about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide in an oval shape. The deepest part is slightly over five feet and the shallow end about four feet. Originally built of bricks with concrete overlay, it had been badly cracked for years by all the neighboring tree roots so it holds very little water.
Soon after we moved in I realized it was something to deal with after I was forced to figure a way to get the wayward raccoons and armadillos out of it. A long-handled fish net did that job nicely.

I had used a third of the three-car garage in the back yard for my office and installed the underground wiring for telephones, computers and television across the 40 feet separating the house and garage.

One evening I was working while a freezing rain fell outside and my wife called on the phone and said someone kept knocking on the front door, but that when she and our daughter went to the door, no one was there.

I told her I would walk around the house and meet them on the front porch. When I got there and looked out the sidewalk toward the old pool I saw a pitiful scruffy mid-sized mutt with a broken leg hobbling along. The dog would look at us and then move toward the old pool. Before we got there she had apparently been pawing at the door for attention

I went to the pool and turned the flashlight on to look down and there was another mid-sized dog standing in about three inches of water and looking up. It looked very much like a pit bull so my reaction was “How do I get that big a dog that is hurt and may be unfriendly out of there?”

I took one section of an extension ladder and placed one end in the pool and the other on the top ledge. A couple of two-foot wide pieces of plywood served as decking.

Of course the dog had no idea how to climb that almost horizontal ladder.

The only way, I told myself, is to get down in that freezing water and hope the dog is friendly. I jumped in and got on the plywood on my hands and knees – and the dog got on right behind me. I worked up to the top of the pool and as soon as possible the dog jumped past me and the two were gone.

Mark Twain gave me the courage to do that. He said: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

That is not the end of the story, but it is the end of’ today’s post. See you soon.

Being indoors is a blessing sometimes — especially when the outside temperature is hovering around 100 degrees. But since I work from or at home, I can just pop outside now and then to enjoy all the friends in our yard.

We do have some indoor friends too. There is MarMar, a used-to-be-yellow lab that lived outside but is now an inside pet since he is 14 and not nearly as strong or agile as he remembers he was. I say used-to-be-yellow lab because, like a lot of us, old age has turned him more white or gray than yellow.

And there is Bobby Boucher (Water Boy – Boo-shay), a male toy poodle that has many clown characteristics, and his sister Thibodaux (tib-e-do for all those not from Southeast Texas – South Louisiana Cajun country).

The regular crowd in the yard includes several cats, both tame and feral, six chickens and the occasional opossum and armadillo. Before we had all those friends in the yard we always had king snakes around, but they seem to have moved to safer ground.

All of this is on our three-acre paradise in South Louisiana where the only way to starve is to be too lazy to go fishing or hunting or to grow some of your food.

This blog will feature some of the escapades of our friends, both those inside and those with fewer privileges. And I hope any readers who would like to add tales of their friends will contribute to this site.

A routine morning begins at 5:30 when the coffee pot turns on. After a quick check of emails and news it’s time to walk the 200 yards to the end of the driveway to pick up the morning paper. Since none of the friends have yet been fed I am usually accompanied by three dogs and at least three cats.

Our neighbor says it is quite a site to see those dogs and cats walking together out the drive and back.

Some visitors ask how we got them to all get along together and we explain that it just seems to be natural. At the first sign of a dog chasing a cat, the dog is verbally reprimanded and it doesn’t take long for the idea of not chasing to sink in.