I am not an "animal/pet person". It is not that I haven't been around them, I have. Growing up we lived on a hobby farm with a whole menagerie of animals (though I will admit, thanks to my mom, we never had any in the house). It isn't that I disliked them, I just had no desire to hold or cuddle or spend to much time with any of them. I loved babies, real live human babies and I held and cuddled them as much as possible.For the first couple of years of married life Ken and I didn't have any pets. After we bought our first house which was out in the country and
we had one girl and one boy we figured the next necessary addition was a dog. Ken picked him out (I said it needed to be a "him" so we wouldn't have to worry about puppies) and he got the most adorable puppy that you have ever seen, a grey and white, blue eyed husky. We were a little naive in our choice of dogs however. Huskies grow quite big (and pretty fast) and they are extremely high energy. I also naively thought that we had 5 nice acres for him to roam on and that he would automatically stay close to home. Well we learned he didn't (after some visits from some neighbors) and so we had to tie him up. That didn't work so well either as he got very good about chewing through and working his way out of any sort of tie-up. I was busy being a mom and didn't have the time to give him the attention needed so we found another home for him. (Even when we watched a low energy Beagle -who also like to roam- I didn't have the time to give to him that he needed either.
We also tried having a cat. That wasn't too successful either. First of all I have allergies so we can't have cats in the house. We decided it could have it's main home in the garage but for some reason it preferred to go the bathroom in every place but the kitty litter. (And at that time I didn't have the Internet to quickly find information on how to train it.) Also the dog scared it badly and after a couple of weeks it disappeared.
We have also tried fish, the worked okay but weren't very exciting.
What we have found to really work for us is a Rabbit! Here is why we like having a pet rabbit.
- It is soft and cuddly and easy for the kids to hold.
- It is quiet. (So it doesn't bother any neighbors)
- It doesn't run away (And even if it did I don't think we would have any neighbors calling us to curse us out when it came into the yard).
- Cages for rabbits are much easier and less extensive then for say a dog. (We were actually blessed because my dad had some he just gave to us.)
- The are pretty inexpensive to feed. The rabbit food probably costs less than $30 a year. We also give it grass, weeds and various kitchen scraps.
- The manure it creates is great for our garden.
