Animal Stories


My Cat Turtle:

I have always liked cats, and sometime in my junior yr in college Tony and I adopted a calico kitty and named her "turtle". She was an exceptionally friendly purr machine and loved to chew shoe laces and sleep on people. Unfortunately we had no home for this poor kitty since both our roommates were allergic to cats plus our leases didn't allow cats anyways. She ended up at my brothers place for a while but same story with his lease so we ended up having to give her back to the adoption agency...TWICE! I only hope she found a good home.

Deblene:

My dad used to work for Big eye Helicopters on Guam and thus had many fishmermen buddies on the fishing/tuna boats these helicopters served. One time, they gave us an illegal pet snapping turtle. My brother and I named it Deblene after a half male and half female cartoon character since we dind't know it's gender. Kept it for a while in the back yard in a tub and went fishing for it and changed the salt water regularly. However, we decided to tag it and let it go when it got too big.

Guinea Fowl:

One day we saw a bunch of guinea fowl in the back yard. My family and I started to feed and tame these birds. I promised Buddah I would not eat pork if these birds kept coming to grace us with their presence. And sure enough, one day my mom managed to capture one of them in the foyer. To our amazement, there was an egg in the cage 2 days later. We decided to capture the rest of the birds and kept them in a cage and hatched all the eggs at a chicken farmer friend of my dads. Believe me, we were soon up to our ears in guinea fowl. But one of the baby birds turned out lame. I blame myself because I had accidentally eaten pork. And same deal with the second batch! I was terrified and to this day am convinced that whenever I eat pork some poor guinea fowl suffers. :( Finally the neighbors complained about the stink and racket and we ended up giving all the birds to that chicken farmer friend...who promptly turned them into dinner! poor poor birdies.

Mr. Eel:

I get this random email one day from Jason about a killer deal on an aquarium....$400 for a 100gal tank, a 20gal tank, plus all accessories and food and chemicals!!! So we drove into Tracy to pick up this huge tank. Due to lack of space it was a while before the tank finally got set up at Eric's place in Berkeley. Eventually I decided I must have an eel so I went and bought one, but since Eric was working late, Jason, Nick, and I broke into Eric's house to put the eel in water...finishing just as Eric got home at 2am! whee fun....ocassionally when the eel refuses to eat, his name is "unagi" or eel sushi.

RATZ!! :

My bro was bugging me to get him russian dwarf hamsters for x-mas one year so I like go down to the east bay vivarium to pick a few up. Unfortunately they were OUT, so I decided to just get him rats instead. Bad idea....two rats Pinky (sweet but dumb) and the Brain(most favored and smartest rat of all) turned into two male/female pairs of rats with the addition of the infamous super-bitch Pinketta (that gashed my thumb good -- see scar) and a super nice quiet SnowWhite. Course, soon it turned into 30 more rats! At that point the females got sold back to the pet store along with most of the babies. A few were kept, Hubba (biggest rat you ever saw), Skunk (Pinketta clone), and Spider (short for spiderman...climber extraodinare). Eventually two more rats were added...the short lived Blue (a literal blue rat that was mauled to death by the others cuz he was a wuss) and Whitey (a smart white rat with super black eyes). I sadly report, all rats have died of peaceful old age or illness (like skunk aka tumor rat and spider). Whitey, our last rat recently died. Soon the cage will be vacated and cleaned out for....the chinchilla.

Hammies:

So like after the rat fiasco, bro and I finally got 3 russian dwarf hamsters. Unfortunately, it was two males and a female... Huey, Dewey (aka dew-ah), and Louie (aka Louisa). Dew-ah got his nick name cuz he killed Huey and impregnated Louie. But since the baby hamsters were worth $3 a pop, we just let em keep breeding and paying for themselves. Eventually we even got a second white albino female like Louisa for extra breeding. Today all original hamsters are dead...shorter lifespan than rats, we had "tubby" left for a while. Unfortunately Eric's cat Spooky likes to jump on the cage and let the hamsters out and hunt them to dead. They were in a nice fancy albeit insecure hamster habitat. We do not plan to breed any more hamsters due to space considerations and multiple cat tragedies. The hamster fun has been put away until it's needed again.

Chinchilla:

One semester, my brothers gf at the time Amy was living with us and we went to the east bay vivarium to pick up pet food for our mucho pets. She was the cute chinchilla and decided we MUST have her, so my bro bought it for her. We named it Chin-cha. Being nocturnal, she would keep Nick awake with her running. Other than that she's easy++ to care for and funt o watch while doing her dust baths. She has totally soft fur and doens't smell at all!

Amy's Cat Ming-Tai:

Well, as Amy had moved in with us, she managed to also drag her cat up with her....Ming-Tai. She was a beautiful but old persian and siamese mix. Very loud and an obnoxious beggar. She came to live with us after I decided it was feasable to keep a cat in the apt....no more allergic roommates! yay! Unfortunately since I eventually got a cat, she went to live with Eric who already had a cat. She was well taken care of and eventually died of old age there...everyone was very sad when it happened.

My Cat Jin-Chan:

Since Amy had been talking about wanting to bring her cat up I decided to get a renta-cat again. Kinda like turtle. We got to the pound just as it was closing so we were unsuccessful. But we ended up lucking out and finding a mobile pet adoption where we picked up this kitty because she 1. slept on people, 2. did not get along with other cats. She is a totally beautiful russian blue, spayed unfortuantely. She follows me around the house, but has gotten out and lost for a few days while I was on vacation. She is known to Nick as devil/evil cat since she peed on him twice while i was on vacation....once in his sleeping bag when he wasn't there, and once when he WAS in there! Her other nickname is "barfy" since she likes to eat this palm plant and throw up the leaves...*sigh* Jin-Chan and Min-Tai roomed together for a while, with only minor fighting. Now, it's Jin-Chan and Spooky, but they seem to fight a lot here and there....mostly when Spooky bothers Jin-Chan while she is in heat.

Eric's Cat Spooky:

Forever known to me as pooky pooky...this cat was kinda my cat surrogate for a while...started the whole ming-tai then jin-chan thingie. In our many pet errands to wet pets in richmond, we found this kitty just being given away. Spooky as she came to be called was very scared and clawed the shit out of Eric when he first picked her up. She is a beautiful scottish fold kitty that likes to jump off the balcony in our house and drink out of the fish tanks. She is also known as horny since she was always in heat. Unfortunately, we got her spayed so we'll have no kittens.

Our Cat Jinxie:

I got this cat while I was working at HomeStore.com. A co-worker there was doing foster work for kittens and after a while I just had to have another cat. I kinda wanted "our" cat since we each had our previous cats. Born on Aug 11 2000 she was too cute to resist. Her name comes from the movie "Meet the Parents", and believe me, she's just as mischievous as that cat. She is also affectionately known as the "pester kitten" or just "pester". She is extremely affectionate and will snuggle and loves being held.