I’ve been surrounded by a variety of animals my entire life including our turtle who we called Rock because he moved about as fast as one. Our Rock is not to be confused with the gag gift that was popular called the Pet Rock®, which came long after our pet Rock. We got Rock as a baby and he was the perfect pet as we never had to feed him or pick up his poop. Fact is, we only saw Rock about once a year.

We had way too many cows and sheep to individually name and granted, they were treated more like a commodity than a pet. But there were many creatures that became so special they became part of our family. Nine times out of 10 they were lovable little babies that were handicapped, orphaned or their mother took one look at them and headed for the hills.

One of our favorites was Two Car, so named because the leppy calf spent the first few months of his life in our garage. We were leasing a ranch, but we lived about 30 minutes away, that was unless the bridge was out, which it often was in winter, which meant going to and from the ranch took an hour and a half. So, when Two Car’s mother died giving birth to him it became a lot easier to feed him three times a day at our house which was right in the middle of a subdivision. I can only imagine what the neighbors thought when Two Car started bawling in the middle of the night for his midnight feeding. Eventually Two Car became quite the celebrity and everyone who heard about the orphan wanted to have their picture taken as they bottle fed him. When the bottle ran dry, he’d try to suck their kneecaps off.

One little lamb will live forever in our hearts. We never knew what caused Angel to be unable to stand on her own four legs. We’d had lambs do this before only to start walking after a few days, but Angel never did. I made a sling for Angel and hung her from a tree with her feet barely touching the ground. We gave the poor thing a bottle three times a day for three weeks, but we were gradually losing her. Usually I reluctantly took care of euthanizing our dying creatures, but this is the one animal I never could bring myself to do it. So, we took Angel to our friend the Vet and asked if he would give Angel the needle after we’d left. I bet he thought my wife and I were big wimps. To this day I often blame myself and wonder if we’d have given Angel one more week maybe she would have found her footing in life.

People who’ve never been around a baby pig might think it odd that a person could fall in love with such a creature but then, they never knew Pancakes. We got Pancakes because she was the runt of a big litter and the man who owned her had a hard heart. I guess you could say we saved Pancake’s life, but she rewarded us daily with a good dose of comic relief. Not to mention the occasional nightmare, like the time she erupted from under an avocado tree and charged the entire local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution as they left the monthly meeting, arms filled with pieces of my mom’s cream pies. There was carnage and whip cream everywhere. After such an escape there was only one way we could lure Pancakes back into her pen and that was to bribe her with some of my mom’s pancakes.

One of the highlights of my life these days is eat lunch monthly with a rancher I’ve known since college. Tiny is a big man with an even bigger heart but at our last visit Tiny looked exhausted but with good reason: he had five calves on the bottle.