Yes, I am an animal lover.  I grew up with a dog; in fact, I don’t ever recall a time as a child when we didn’t have a dog.  Of course, while I was in college, I had no pets.  But after that, for most of my adult life, we have always had a pet of some sort – cats or dogs.

Now, my wife, Sheri, is an avid horse lover in addition to our “inside pets”.  So, at home, we have 3 horses now, and she has one other named Zoe who lives at the training barn. She shows Zoe at her Arabian performance shows.  But, for many years now, all of our “indoor” pets have been rescue animals.

Filbert, a medium-sized doodle, was one of our first rescues.  (Sheri named him that because he was a silly nut.)  Sheri’s parents found Filbert near their home out in Eagle Mountain on a cold winter morning.  He had been dumped off out there we think.  He was lost, scared, freezing and very, very timid.  Once her folks had mostly nursed him back to health, physically, we adopted him.  Filbert was so mentally scarred from his abandonment that for the first month or so, every time Sheri put him in the car to go to work with her, he would vomit.  But after a few months of nice stable home life, Filbert turned into a happy little, crazy goofball.  He lived a nice long life, and he was probably the best dog we’ve ever had.

Some of you who have been clients, or followers, for quite a long time may remember Rajah, or as my assistant, Kymm, called him “our shop kitty”.  We adopted Rajah when he was a little kitten from a local Humane Society event that they were having at a nearby Pet’s Mart.  Rajah and his siblings were on their last day, and were going to be terminated if they were not adopted out that day.  Rajah was one of the most loving and outgoing cats that I’ve ever had.  He was a really big boy, usually running about 15 to 16 pounds, and from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail he was close to 4 feet long when all stretched out. 

One of his favorite things to do while I was meeting with clients would either be to jump up on my desk and cover up all of the paperwork we were looking at, or he would sneak into the office and get behind the guest chair where the client was sitting.  Then he would reach up and scratch the chair, scaring the client have to death.  He thought this was hilarious.  One day he scared one of my clients so much that they asked me if he was a bobcat, and I laughed very hard.  (Rajah had a very long and fluffy tail, so no bobcat; he was a Maine Coone mix.)  He finally passed away at 20 years old, and I still miss him terribly.

For those of you who follow my personal Facebook page, I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of Rocky.  Rocky is quite a character, and he probably gets close to 100 kisses a day between Sheri and I.  The beginning of his life was absolutely horrific.  One of my friends who is a horse trainer up in Morgan, UT found Rocky as a tiny kitten (maybe four weeks old if that) unconscious on the road in front of her house with wounds to his head and face.  She thinks that he was either thrown from a moving vehicle or perhaps bumped by a car as it passed by.  He was temporarily paralyzed with his neck pulled back and his front legs completely locked out while his back legs were locked up tucked underneath him.

Somehow through Michelle’s incredible care and with perhaps some extra help from above he pulled through, and she nursed him back to health.  Michelle had posted a couple of videos and pictures of Rocky on her Facebook page, and he caught my eye.  We made arrangements to come up and look at him, and Sheri and I fell for him immediately.  We waited another two or three weeks until Michelle felt that he was healthy enough before we brought him home.  Like his namesake, Rocky Balboa, Rocky T as Sheri calls him (the T is for trouble) is a super tough but tenderhearted furball.  Unlike Rajah, Rocky doesn’t like strangers, so it’s very rare that anyone besides Sheri or I actually see him.  He’s super lovey, loves to play ball, and catch it in midair, and he’s quite a lap kitty.  If he’s hungry and standing near the pantry or pestering me in my office, if I ask him if he’s hungry, he will make a little meow sound that very much resembles “yeah”.

Last but not least is Rocky’s new buddy, Adrian.  Adrian is a beautiful little white and orange medium hair female cat that we rescued at our house.  We had to name her Adrian because of course we have Rocky.  She, unfortunately has another sad story.  Our next-door neighbor is horse trainer, and one of her client’s friends dropped off Adrian and another cat because the original owners were going to be in Europe for six months and couldn’t keep them.  The neighbor, Ammie, told the lady that she already had too many pets in the house as well as some outdoor cats and couldn’t guarantee that the kitties would still be around or even alive when the lady came back. This lady told Ammie that it was either that or she would take them to the Humane Society.  So, Ammie relented.

Well, a few weeks to a month later, we caught Adrian stealing bird food and bird suet in our backyard.  The poor thing was almost starved to death at that point, and she had a couple of pretty rough wounds on her body, probably from a catfight.  Adrian is not a big kitty; even now, she only weighs around 9 pounds.  So, Sheri got her some food and water and put it on the back patio for her.  So, for several months, we brought her food and water three times a day on our back patio, and she ended up sleeping on a shelf underneath our barbecue.  We had a couple of old kitty beds downstairs; one of them was like a tent.  We put those out for her on the barbecue under the cover, and that became her home until we brought her in right before 4 July.  (Her previous owners never came back for her, and her chip was never registered to anyone.)

She was supposedly vaccinated, but we had no idea if she really was or if she had ended up being exposed to some horrible diseases, so I made her a vet appointment to have her completely checked over.  We knew she probably wouldn’t survive the Fourth of July around our place because it turns into a war zone.  After the vet check, we brought her inside and kept her in a room in our basement for two weeks.  We were waiting for all of the test results, and she also had a pretty nasty infection in her mouth as well. 

Fortunately, it turned out she didn’t have any of the bad diseases, so after two weeks of our multiple visits daily, we introduced her to the main house and Rocky.  Now they’re buddies, and Adrian sleeps on the bed between us most nights.  She is still healing mentally from the abandonment trauma, and we think that her previous owners were not very nice to her as she is still very skittish around us when we walk around.  But every day she’s getting happier, and she and Rocky love playing chase, watching the birdies out the window, and getting lots of love.

Well, I know this is quite a bit different from my usual photography posts, but I do hope you have enjoyed the pet story. Have fun out there, and thanks so much for visiting my blog.