Day 27: Pets

This is one of my favorite challenges so far!  I am such a huge animal lover and I LOVE my dogs and cat more than anything!!  I'm warning you in advance, though, this is a long post.

My family has always had dogs and cats growing up, but none of them were "mine."  I do have a soft spot for our dog Otis.  He's a full-blooded black lab that we call special.  We've had him since he was born because we also had his mom, Lucy.  There were complications with Lucy's litter of puppies and a lot of them lost oxygen at birth.  She had twelve puppies and only six survived because of this.  Otis was one of the ones who lost oxygen (we think).  Then when he was about eight weeks old, he fell off of our back porch and fractured his jaw.  He's HUGE (115 pounds) and has a really loud bark, but for most of his life, he's been such a scaredy cat.  I can't find a picture of him on my computer, but here is Lucy...

Lucy

We also have a family cat who is meaner than any animal I've ever met.  He will attack my other cat for no reason and will hiss and growl, yes, growl, at anybody who is in his way.  He used to like me the best, but then I moved away and came back with another cat and now he hates me the most.  We got Maverick from my brother's best friend's grandparent's farm.  He was a wild kitten and spent the first few days holed up in the garage because he would not come near any of us.

Maverick

So the first year after college I lived with three other people in a decent sized apartment, but it was just that, an apartment.  One of my roommates had already gotten a dog and I wanted a dog, too.  I went to the animal shelter and looked at adopting two different dogs (after crying my eyes out because I couldn't save all of the dogs...), but both dogs ended up belonging to other people and the owners came and got them.  One day, I went to look at cats and fell in love with this princess...

Emmy is the most spoiled cat I have ever known.  She is super sweet and LOVES to be around people.  Total opposite of Maverick. 

About a month after I got Emmy, my sister's roommate's boyfriend had a new dog with him when he was visiting.  He had found the dog on the Appalachian Trail while hiking.  The dog was hanging out in some parking lot and when David got back from hiking, the dog was still there.  So he took him home, but couldn't keep him.  I volunteered to keep him, and soon fell in love with the dog.  I named him Marley and you can tell he had a rough life before me.  He's scared of loud noises and shouting (even if it's not angry shouting), he had major separation anxiety when I first got him (he would stand by the door for hours when I would leave him with my mom), and he had a piece of a BB gun bullet/pellet/whatever in his ear that had to be cut out! 

This is when I first got Marley.  He was underweight and about a year old.

Now, this fat boy is spoiled rotten, still skittish of loud noises and voices, and overweight.  

For my 24th birthday, I wanted a black lab puppy.  We've always had black labs growing up and I love them.  I found a breeder and they only had a black male left...it was destiny.  I went and picked up this wild child:

He was so small then and so precious!  

Ace is the wildest, worst behaved dog I have ever had.  Ever seen the movie Marley and Me?  That's Ace.  He's a year and a half old now and has been bitten by a snake, broken his first metal crate by chewing his way out of it and then bending the door (metal, y'all), busted out of his second crate and bent the door (less than 24 hours after having surgery, I might add), jumps any fence he can to go play in the creek behind our house, demolishes supposedly indestructible toys and bedding, and ripped his stomach open on who knows what.  

I got a call from my mom at work almost two months ago telling me she had to rush Ace to the vet because he had jumped the fence and ripped his stomach open.  He needed surgery to staple it back together and then a tube had to be inserted to allow it to drain all the gross fluids.  Did that stop him?  No.  Within days, he jumped the fence again.  And again.  And again.  With staples in his stomach.  This dog doesn't care about getting in trouble, doesn't care about consequences, and is the worst behaved dog I've ever had.  But he is the sweetest dog ever and loves everything and everyone, so it makes it all okay.  For all of his wild child tendencies, he really is one of the sweetest dogs ever and loves on everyone.

So there's my animals.  I can't wait to read about everyone else's!