This page is more of a shrine than the other pages. Animals' lives are so short compared to our own, and they pass through swiftly, full of love and friendship. If you're tender hearted, you might just want to look at the pictures and forget reading the captions. Not all of these animals are dead, but who knows what will happen in the months and years to come?

I suppose my family's method of pet raising is kind of unique. Our position we can raise them in is also unique. We have a fairly secluded house with 40 acres that animals can roam on to their delight and relative safety. There's enough houses around that there aren't many predators, and there's just few enough that there aren't a lot of cars. Our cats can hunt and climb trees with just their back claws (much to our amazement), and our dogs lope for hours every day exploring and making their marks. They are both house and outside dogs, using the bathroom outside and scratching for the door to be opened (Teabelle is the exception here; she's too small for mom to let her outside, so she has a poop pad in my parents' bedroom). We recently got a dog door, but they're lazy and still demand for us to let them out of doors so they don't have to go all the way to the other end of the house :p

Tyge was my mom's particular pet from 1994-2007. She got him from the pound when he was a tiny puppy, and he never grew up to be very big. Somewhere she decided or maybe found out he was a mix of lhasa apso and some sort of terrier, at any rate he was extremely short, especially compared to the other dogs that came through our lives. He was pretty touchy about being picked up; only mom could really ever do it, and you couldn't really cuddle with him, but he was a very sweet dog anyways, and loved for people to scratch his back. He gave us a scare one summer when he started having wheezing asthma sounding attacks, and developed a round boil thing on his ear, but nothing came of it, except one of his ears would hang down and the other still be up perked. He finally started to show signs of age in the last year of his life; he could obviously not see very well in the dark, nor smell as well as he could and it was easy to startle him, making him growl. He finally passed on in either September or October, the day before I came home for a weekend visit from college. I had some big bubble packing material, and as I got out of my car, i asked where he was so i could scare him like dad always liked to, and my mom's face broke down and they came over to tell me that it was too late for that.

When I was in third grade, all of our cats contracted a form of feline leukemia and died. After a winter passed, my mom thought it would be safe to have a cat again, and I looked forward to getting one. I had the names 'Amedeus' picked out if it were a girl cat, and 'Wolfgang' if it a boy. We got Aomy, and I decided that 'wolfgang' was a crappy name anyways, and picked the good one. Either one was appropriate, as it turned out, as Aomy was an incrediably melodic cat. We figured he must be part maine coon because he had the grey tabby markings and the large size and the thick tufts of fur between his toe pads, but also he could do the most beautiful meows. I practiced hard and intermittantly over a course of years and became able to mimick it with pretty good accuracy; good enough to fool my aging parents from the next room. After he died in Feburary of 2007, I disliked the call to memory and have only done it rarely since. Besides, who else could understand it besides he and I?

Monarch Butterfly came shortly after. I'm not sure why we needed two cats, but we had them. He and Aomy were pretty much like brothers; you could say their heartland would have been Philadelphia. This picture shows this in the clearest way possible. It was adorable. Monty sadly did not live as long as Aomy. He ran away before we had him for very long, and I can't imagine he lived long after that.

This is one of the few pictures we have of Penny. I guess Inspector Gadget gave me the impression that every beagle must be named Penny (although his niece's was a bassett hound, wasn't she?). Living on so much land, our dogs have always traipsied across it at long lengths, and the bluff was no exception. I don't remember where she came from, she wasn't an 'official' dog, since she was never let into the house, but she was the most loving thing I ever knew, to annoyance sometimes. She met her end by the car of my brother's roommate, who was trying to back out. It didn't quite kill her, so our neighbor had to come by and shoot her, since my brother and dad weren't at home. When my brother came across another beagle from a dump, our nephews didn't quite understand how death worked, and called her Penny Two, as if she were a Sequel. Penny Two was much more skittish than her predecessor, and really is only notable in that she gave birth to Mussinus, as harsh as that is to say.

My sister's cat had kittens, and while I was on vacation in Louisiana, we gained one of them. I had three weeks after that to think of a name for my kitten 400 miles away. I named him after my favorite math teacher, a very fitting name, for Young Cato has proved to be just as aloof as his namesake, who is an intensely cat-adoring man. There's also some sort of Roman pun in there somewhere, Julius Caesar. He and Aomy came to be fairly close, although there was a distance that Aomy and Monty lacked. I loved seeing them be sweet to one another, since cats typically have trouble adjusting to newcomers.

Did you know that Young Cato is actually a she? It took a while to find out, but my grandma insisted that he was a calico and thus a female long before he made it to the vet to get fixed.

Reita is possibly the least-threatening rottweiler dog you could know. Part of that might be that she's a quarter Chow! (Her tongue is spotted and her build isn't as bulky as a rottweiler). She is very loving, although pretty skittish of new animals and thunderstorms. She grew up with a bean-bag for a bed, and when I brought mine home from college, she promptly has taken it up again, so that it's going to be hard to part her from it when I leave again xD

I'm not sure if I would even want this picture to be any sharper. Young Cato has an intense air of mystery here.

The baby of Penny Two, one of two, although of the three, only he survived.

It took a while for mussie to be named. My brother called him pudgy and rolly and fatty while he had him, and it was only after he couldn't stand him terrorizing the cats anymore that we took him up and had five pets for the first time in a long time.

Mussie has survived a lot in his time, firstly being born at all (His father was a husky, so it was a hard delivery for a little beagle), then he got Parvo, which I was so thankful I didn't wiki before he came home because I would've died of fright :| Most recent, he was hit by a car or something (a rare happening on our road, to be sure) which threw his back out, leaving him unable to walk for a while (mostly by doctor's orders). He has gone back to insane playing, but he pays for it afterwards in whimpers and being stove-up. Is it a coincidence that the two of our dogs we got after my mother hurt her back have also gotten hurt? (Reita was also run over, getting her leg broken, so she's limped for years)

There's not much else to say about Mussie except he's terribly photogenic and handsome.

Teabelle is my mother's new particular dog. She went so many years with Tyge at her side that she couldn't bear the idea of being without a close friend. People had always joked about tyge resembling a chihuahua, so one of those was the logical choice. There is a distinct resemblence between the two; they can both get very excited or cranky. She is even smaller though! Mussie has a dreadful time trying to play with her--it's just as funny to watch as watching tyge and reita fight, where tyge would just go between her legs and snap at him. Eventually she developed the tactic of just fighting him while laying down xD Mussie just usually ends up playing too hard, so mom has to slap his mouth away so he doesn't chew her up xD