We've not got quite the menagerie we used to
have. At one point, not long after Naomi joined me, we had 3 dogs, a cat and 5
tanks of tropical fish. Naomi's love of animals stems from an early age, where
she used to collect every waif and stray she could find and take them home,
including someone's pedigree German Shepherd Dog that just happened to be
playing on the same stretch of beach as her! We now content ourselves with a
standard poodle (Sam), an African Grey Parrot (Gus), four Budgies (Cheeky et
al), a tankful of tropical catfish, and occasionally a ginger tom (Boris), but
every time we go anywhere near a petshop I have to fend off demands for
hyacinth macaws, lop-eared rabbits, chinchillas, kittens, more budgies...
:-)
Sindy was a beautiful 11-year old long-haired
standard dachshund when I first met her. Naomi had had her since she was a
puppy. Sadly, she contracted cancer and had to be put down a few years ago. Of
all the dogs we've had, though, she was the most fearless. She had a few
horrible habits, like burying half-chewed bones underneath your pillow
[ughhhhh!], and one had to be very careful about sitting on your bed, because
likely as not she had burrowed under the duvet.
Garfield was a very long-haired ginger tom, and
likewise arrived with Naomi in 1991. He and Sindy were quite inseparable, and
an unlikely partnership of thieves: If we ever inadvertently left any food on a
counter for any length of time, the cat would be there not just eating its
fill, but also pawing titbits onto the floor for the patiently waiting
dachshund. After the arrival of our other dogs, however, Garfield defected to
our next-door neighbour while we were still living in Ramsbottom. Although he
and Sindy were inseparable, the other dogs were a bit larger and more
boisterous, as you'll see.
Nero is, quite simply, one of the most handsome dogs I've ever seen. I'd never had a dog while I was living in Ramsbottom, because it would have meant leaving the dog on its own at home during my shifts, something I don't agree with. I'd always wanted a doberman, though, and one time when we were up in Scotland we heard about a kennels that had one of their own dogs whom they'd rescued from its former owner. We ended up getting him ourselves:
Nero was 9 months old when I got him and totally scatty. He had a somewhat small bladder and so I regularly got literally dragged out of bed [jaws firmly clamped on wrist] at 5am to let him out to lift his leg. He'd steal anyone else's ball given half a chance, and would puncture any pumped up ball within seconds. He regularly used to run off when I was walking him and keep his distance for a couple of hours, deaf to all entreaties, bribes, or threats. While we had him he chewed up 4 duvets, 6 duvet covers, a couple of pillows and, his piéce de resistance, a complete settee and armchair: One evening whilst Naomi was ill in hospital I was busy with my email with my back to the main bit of our lounge. I became aware that for some time there had been a sort of faint intermittent ripping sound from behind me. I turned round and the whole of the rest of the room was covered in little bits of foam rubber.
Despite all this, though, Nero was fantastic
and I loved him to death. The reason we no longer have him, however, was
Naomi's asthma, because she turned out to be fairly allergic to him because of
his short fine hair. He's still alive and living the life of Riley in some
stables in the middle of nowhere in Ayrshire, Scotland. We were lucky enough to
find this place because Naomi's sister kept her horse there and the young girl
who ran the stables wanted a dog. Nero loves it there, gets on well with the
horses, and has the complete run of the place. He's now rather arthritic, but
he still recognises us when we visit occasionally, and I'd have him back
tomorrow!
Sammy, our black standard poodle, we got as a 8-week old ball of fluff. Within a day Naomi was threatening to send him back because he went for her when she tried to roll him onto his back and in his early days, he threatened to be unmanageably aggressive. He's mellowed with time, though, and because his coat is wool rather than hair, he does not cause any allergic reaction in Naomi. He's now very well trained and obedient, and great fun. Loves the narrowboat and travelling, but tries to intervene if Naomi and I start to either fight or dance [go figure!]. If we merely argue, however, he tends to disappear to the opposite end of wherever we happen to be and stays there until it's clear that things are back to normal.
Recently Sammy has been taking to doing
impressions of the alien from Aliens III, with the arrival of Zoe, but she is gradually winning him round. He's very
good with the birds and almost completely ignores them. He certainly knows to
stay clear of them after having had his nose tweaked a couple of times in their
early days. Sammy unfortunately is no longer with us. He was found to have a
cancer in his bowel in 2000 and we had to have him put to sleep before he
started suffering. A sad day...
Rosie was only with us for a few weeks. She was
a tiny kitten when Naomi bought her without consulting me (see reference to
collecting waifs & strays above <grin>). She turned out to completely
manic and if she'd stayed with us for much longer I would surely have had a
nervous breakdown. You could be watching television, but completely unable to
concentrate because of this banshee shooting around the room, up the curtains,
climbing the walls to get to a fly. She'd also attack anything that moved and
was young enough that she hadn't learnt to sheath her claws a bit. Absently
scratching an itch was a bad habit with Rosie around... She went out foraging
one day and never returned, either run over or kidnapped, we never knew. If it
was the latter, the kidnapper has my sympathies... :-)
Boris was my sister-in-law's ginger tom that we inherited when she had her first child. Boris is huge, 1½ times the size of a normal cat, but without an ounce of fat on him. Although we still reckon we own him, he doesn't actually spend much of his time here, but shares himself around about 5 sympathetic and generous neighbours all of whom feed him from time to time. He comes visiting regularly, until Sammy decides to tell him off for some real or imagined insult...
Boris's main claim to fame dates from when he
was living with Naomi's parents, before we had him. At that time their
household consisted of 5 cats, a doberman (Nero's half-sister), a Cavalier King
Charles and, if we were visiting, our three dogs. Boris was afraid of nothing
and was the undisputed ruler of the roost. A doberman would be walking past
his chair and a paw would snake out and biff him/her on the nose.
Another time we have a sequence on video of a liver & tan doberman lying
asleep on an armchair with an orange tail coming out from underneath the dog,
idly swishing the time away!
Cheeky is a blue/green budgie, and one of the more recent additions to our menagerie. She's been joined more recently by Flint, Topaz and Cloud, but Cheeky (whom we believe is the only female amongst them, though the other three are a bit young to tell with certainty) rules the roost. Cheeky is a holy terror, and not quite the loveable cuddly creature one is accustomed to. Cheeky will sink her beak into almost anything which comes within range, when she's in one of her moods. They all live in a converted doberman cage, which now lives in our back yard, which they seem to prefer to indoors. No success in getting any of them to talk yet, but there's plenty of time. Cheeky's likes and dislikes include Home & Away and Neighbours, which she loves and chatters all the way through them. Hates being petted, but loves standing on top of your head!
We eventually lost Flint and Lemon one autumn
night. They managed to get out of the bottom of their cage, but couldn't find
their way back in, and appear to have starved. We found them the following
morning just beside their cage. We decided that we didn't have the room inside
the house to bring the surviving three back inside, and that it was too
difficult to keep a decent eye on them outside, so we gave them to our local
pet shop to sell on to new owners.
At one point we had five tanks of fish, two of those being 6'x2'x2' tanks, each holding about 150 gallons. In one of those tanks we had a large community of non-aggressive tropical fish, mostly a large variety of catfish. In the other tank, though, we had our best fish, 2 mating pairs of fully-grown oscars ("The Management"), an 18" lungfish (a bit like an eel), a 9" long monster gibbiceps (a bit like a plec) called Rupert, and Fred, an 18" red-tailed catfish.
We're now left with just one of those large
tanks and sadly we had to part with all of the latter except Rupert when we
moved house (we originally bought the second large tank in order to help move
the first). We were lucky enough to find someone in Newcastle who had a tank
large enough to hold Fred. This was always going to be a problem, since they
pull Red-tails out of the Amazon that are 2 metres long. We now have a medium
sized community of specialist catfish, including a giraffe-nosed cat, some
black sharks a breeding pair of ancistrus, and a brace of callychthus
callychthus (a bit like hoplo's). Rupert passed away last year, which was very
sad for us, since we'd had him for a long time. In 1997 we decided that
maintaining the 6' tank down in our cellar was too awkward and gave the tank
and fish to a friend who has set them up magnificently in his attic bedroom.
Gus is a more recent acquisition. He's a 5 month old African Grey Parrot and an absolute treasure. He's 100% hand-tame and loves nothing more than to sit on a hand and either get stroked behind his head, or to play with zips, tassles and just plain chew the hell out of your collar [...nose, ear, anything else that comes to beak]. He's a real baby, given that Greys can live to a ripe old age of 60, and still a bit slow and clumsy, but all the more comical for that at times.
He has a wide variety of toys, and loves to pounce on them, flapping his wings and experimenting with noises when he gets excited - great fun to watch. We've bought him a huge cage which dominates the living room, but which gives him plenty of room to explore and get excercise. Mind you, he spends half his day outside playing with Naomi...
He's becoming far more vocal now and gave us his first "Hello" on 8th July 1997! Like Cheeky, his preferred soaps are Home & Away and Neighbours, but he seems to like QVC quite a lot too <grin>. Gus has a friend called Max across in the States, and he and Max swap emails quite a lot :).
Gus had become a real chatterbox by the end of 1997. By now
(October 1999) he's got a fairly wide repertoire, including "Hello Daddy,
I love you, Come Here!!!" and he whistles the first few bars of Colonel
Bogie, and has a superb imitation of the Martian Siren from War of the Worlds!
He is also very good at imitating the way Daisy speaks. The trouble is that he
tends to shut up if he knows that anyone else is around.
Daisy is now our most recent acquisition. She's a sulphur-crested cockatoo, and we also bought her when she was just weaned, having been bred and hand-reared in Falkirk, Scotland, by "Mr Macaw". Daisy is very different to Gus in character: She is a complete limpet and wishes for nothing more than to be surgically attached to Naomi, to whom she has firmly bonded [just as well, too, since Gus appears to have bonded to me]. At one point We were thinking of renaming her "Clingfilm" or "Klingon", but Daisy's too nice a name.
Daisy is a great comedienne. She is already learning some tricks, and will "dance" on command, as well as waving and shaking hands. No speech yet, but there are times when she comes out with something very close to "Hello" so we're confident she will be speaking soon enough. She loves playing with the toys in her cage, and Naomi has made her a Gus quite a large range of home-made toys. Daisy is also increasingly vocal and by 1999 she was really chatty. She says "Night Night Daisy" when we come to turn the lights off at night, and invariably greets me with a "Hello Daddy" when I get home from work.
We're not sure yet whether or not Gus and Daisy
have really hit it off. When put together, they mutually nibbled each other's
beaks, but this sometimes gets a bit out of hand, so we tend to keep them apart
for now. We've got two young apple trees planted in large water butts in our
back yard, and when it's reasonably warm we let them both loose. We also have
two large cages in the garden so that they can stay out in nice weather even if
we're not with them the whole time.
In 1998 we completely remodelled our back garden to give us more
usable space for plants & storage and the opportunity to create a
watercourse and pond. This was a sizeable project which involved building a
large wodden structure which would have plants and the waterfall on top and
storage underneath, as shown on the right here. The pond was partially
excavated and partially built up behind a stone wall and holds about 1500
gallons. Although not really big enough for a good koi pond, Naomi decided that
this is what the pond was for, and The New Management came into our lives in
the form of a number of small koi carp, who will hopefully grow and thrive over
the years to come. The back garden is now a lovely oasis for us, particularly
during the summer evenings.
What can I tell you? Naomi dragged me out to
the farm auctions at Clitheroe one evening and somehow we came back with a
couple of hamsters. In not very long this had become a sizeable colony of
rotastack units and other cages and a concerted breeding programme! We
currently have two sets of youngsters and about 4 adult Syrian hamsters. The
litters we mostly give away to a local pet shop, sometimes keeping the best
back, and they all reside in the cellar where Naomi can keep an eye on them
easily.
Another standard poodle, I hear you say. Yes, we've just (November 1999) gone out and got a second poodle, a bitch this time. Naomi wanted to get another poodle, so that Sammy could knock it into shape befopre he passes on. She (Naomi) would have preferred an apricot or chocolate poodle, but settled for another black one in the end. This pup is now 11 weeks old, having been born exactly on my birthday, 14th August. More news to follow, but some early pictures can be seen by clicking on the link above.
Zoe is learning fast and is already
house-trained for the most part, and comes and sits on command already. She's
recently hit it off good style with Naomi's parents' boxer, Jaffa, and the two
of them play incessantly whenever we or they are visiting.
In October 1999 we acquired a couple of
lovely-looking ringneck parakeets, because Naomi wanted some smaller parrots
and at present birds such as a Myers Parrot, Senegal Parrot, a Caique or one of
the smaller Amazons is beyond us. We got these lovely birds from the livestock
auctions at Clitheroe, and they now live in a decent-sized cage in our Lounge.
The trouble we're having with them up till now is their being
completely wild, not even half-tame, and compared to Gus &
Daisy, they're really boring. They just sit there. They don't
play with their toys, and apart from an occasional squawk, they never say
anything, hence the name we've given them.
Rags, Our First Border CollieIn March 2001, we "happened" to visit
the Border Collie Rescue Trust in Staffordshire and fell in love with a 12
month old tricolour Border Collie bitch whom they had called Breeze. We ended
up "rescuing" her. Since "Breeze" had been her name for
only a couple of days, we decided to called her Rags (short for Puddleduck
Gladrags (!!!!). To date, she's settling in really well and I can't wait to
startt raining her and ultimately doing competitive obedience with her.