I feel sorry for all you guys...whether it be people, animals, or plushies (), Losing things we care deeply about is a real drag. I've lost a LOT of pets in the past.

Let me start by saying that I used to live on a farm--not a farm with animals like pigs and cows and horses, just a farm setting that had barns and sheds and stuff. We used the barns to store stuff but...whatever. Point is my old house was a farm in the sense that we had a couple big red barns and a large penned-in area that was originally for cows.

With all that space, we of course needed some animals to fill it up. Not animals like cows, we wanted...dogs, or cats. Well, first thing we did was buy two puppies from a someone in the newspaper. The dang things were in a litter of about 15 or so, I can remember picking them up (I was about nine at the time). The owners weren't home, so we had to open this huge kennel with all those little crazy dogs in it and somehow get only two of them. Needless to say, some got out and we had to drag to the kennel. After a lot of work, we finally picked out two, put them in a box, and took them home.

We loved those little guys. Well, girls actually...they were both female. We named them Sammy and Patches. Sammy was a yellow lab/golden retriever mix, and Patches was a German Shepered/black lab mix. Mutts, but cute mutts. We kept them in a very large, fenced area that connected to a barn--a huge area for these dogs to stay in. We got them little doghouses that we kept in the barn, as well as water and food bowls. It was a good setup for them. We ended up having them for all the nine years we lived there. Good times were had with those dogs. We loved them a lot. Every night I would fall asleep to them howling and barking at God knows what. It sounds like it would be annoying but somehow it was soft and soothing.

Well, about a year ago we moved away from that farm, to a more suburban area...so obviously we had to get rid of Sammy and Patches. At our new house there is no room for them anywhere. We had to hand them over to the Humane Society, where they were undoubtedly put to sleep...two mutts that don't have a snowball's chance of getting picked up by a family...sounds like a shoe-in to me. Anyway, moving from that house and getting rid of those dogs was very sad for me...I had known them since I was a kid.

And don't even get me started on cats...we have owned (and lost) so many cats over the years it's absurd. I can remember a few...keep in mind these were all outside cats, as the only reason we got them was to keep the rodent population down in our huge yard.

Caesie: Pronounced "Kessie", this was our first cat. A very pretty one, with brown and black fur. It was the sweetest little thing you've ever seen. Always affectionate, friendly, loved to be pet. One time, it ran away. We were devestated. Three whole months later, it came back. Bedraggled and skinny, it came waltzing down our driveway one evening. Quite amazing. A few months later, Caesie was diagnosed with feline leukemia and had to be put to sleep. Never saw her again (duh).

Mandy: We got this one shortly after Caesie. Not a very attractive cat, it was just a plain gray tabby. We had this one for quite a while. It got pregnant a few years after we got it, and had a whole big litter of kittens. Now those things were adorable. There were so many of them, we played with them all the time. (This is when me and my siblings were nine and ten remember). After a couple weeks though, Mandy ran away with all her kittens, never saw them again.

Snowball: This was a short-lived little kitty. We got him in Caesie's absence, he was a kind of bad-tempered little guy--he reminded me of a moody teenager. I can remember one time I was holding him while my dad lit a very loud sparkler on Fourth of July, the guy ripped out of my hands so fast he cut a chunk of skin off with his claws. Very high-strung.
This may seem awful, but Snowball was killed by our dogs. He got into their pen somehow and predictably, he got slaughtered. I didn't know until about a year later when I was mature enough to handle it. Until then my parents just said he ran away. I don't blame them.

Sirus and Orion: Two kittens that we got from a neighbor. Cute little buggers. One was white and black if I remember right, and the other was darker colored. They were spry little guys, alway running around and climbing on our woodpile when we let them. We had them for a short time before they met the same fate as Snowball. My dad was so angry he was thinking of giving the dogs away; he thought they were doing more bad than good. He said that out of anger though, we never really considered giving them away.

Katt: Our last cat. Also the best cat. He was a plain gray tabby like Mandy, but built differently--short and stocky instead of lanky and skinny. He also had a big head. Katt was (and is, as far as I know), one of the most intelligent cats I've ever seen. Not intelligent like trained, intelligent like he knew what the deal was. I think he knew why we we got him (to kill mice), and made sure he did that. He always brought his spoils to the doorstep, as to make sure we knew he killed something. Some days there was just a clump of bloody fur outside our door and we knew that Katt had killed another mouse/rat/rabbit/bird or whatever. Sometime during the period of time when we were moving (as in packing all the stuff up in our barns and moving boxes), Katt ran away. We thought that he figured we were leaving the house and couldn't take him, so he left. Let it be known that if Katt had not ran away, we would have given him to the Humane Society, where he would have been put to sleep.

Katt almost met the same fate as Snowball and Sirus and Orion. One night, when me and my dad were up working in one of the sheds, we heard awful noises coming from the dog pen...something was getting the beatdown, and we suspected it was our cat. We ran our asses down there and were shocked.

In the dog pen, there is a large machine coming out of the side of the barn that it's connected to--a sort of conveyor that was used, in its day, to bring food from outside the barn to inside. On this machine (it was a long, metal arm-type thing that ended in a hollow metal cranny) was our two dogs, barking furiously at the metal cranny on the end. They were also trying to shove their heads in but the opening was too small. We shooed the dogs away (furiously; my dad kicked at them), and locked them in the barn. In the metal compartent at the end of the machine, we found Katt, bleeding and shivering, scared out of his wits. But alive. He had escaped the wrath of our dogs by doing something none of our other cats had done: being quick and hiding somewhere the dogs could not possibly reach him, a small compartment at the end of the largest structure in the kennel. We were amazed.

We got him out of there somehow and gave him food and water. He cleaned his own wounds, like any cat would. Seemed pretty calm too. Considering he just narrowly escaped getting torn apart by two wild dogs, that is.

Well, like I said, we moved from the farm about a year ago. And when we moved we thought Katt had left for good. But in the months following moving to the new house, we had to continuously go back to the old house to move some more boxes, clean out another storage area, help the new owners with a problem in a barn...normal stuff. But one day, when we were moving junk out of a final barn, we saw Katt.

He just walked right up to us. Cool as ice. Started meowing and stuff. We of course started barraging him with pets and scratches behind the ears. The wierdest part was, he wasn't skinny or gaunt or anything--he looked fairly healthy. We guessed that the new owners of the house had been feeding him. It was the wierdest thing.

That was about three months ago. I haven't seen Katt since. He's probably being fed and loved by the owners of the new house...either that or he ran away and is dead somewhere. I sure hope not. He was one of my favorite pets. Since we moved into the new house, my parents have thought of getting a dog (a basenji to be more exact), but the idea died off. We moved here to make our lives simpler...my parents were getting too old to maintain a farm. A dog would just cause more headaches; I think we can all agree with that.

Wow, sorry that was so long. If you didn't read it all I understand. Once again, my sympathies to you if you've ever lost a pet, family member, or anything, that you loved a lot. It hurts.