How many pets are too many?

Day 39

As mentioned at the end of yesterday's post, I'll be writing about pets a bit more frequently starting today and the main reason is simple: animals have been part of my life ever since I was a kid.  You want proof? Well, here you go:

Is very hard for me to pin-point the exact date of that picture but I was definitely very young and was prior to 1991, that I know because of the dog.  Additionally, I can tell you the following details: It was in the front side of my childhood home (same place I was recently visiting), we used to have a lemon tree in the front, now days a type of palm tree, but most importantly is the oldest picture of myself with one of my pets.

This one was named Flash (and I think that technically this one is Flash 2) and I'm pretty sure my older brothers have best memories of him, I hardly remember Flash since I was very young at the time, but I think is a good exercise to mention all the pets that have been around me, in certain order of remembrance:

1- Poochy

2- Flash

3- Flash 2

4- Alf (my greatest love and someone whom I will be taking about in more details at a later date)

5- Putica (my first cat, she was a stray we adopted at home, the name translates to "Slutty" due to her tendency of being in heat)

6- Bingo - An adopted stray dog - This one also deserves his own post due to some interesting stories around him.  I only have one picture of poor Bingo, that will be shared eventually.

7- A female collie - the poor bitch suffered from epilepsy.  She was adopted from a place where she was abused, we try to give all the love we could, but her disease got the best of her. The owner was my brother Armando.

8- Daneta - Technically her name was different, and just as the bitch above, my brother Armando was the owner.  She was adopted as a puppy, but I think she was either poisoned or died due to parvovirus.

Alf was with my family for roughly 15 years, and after he passed away, I personally never got pet for quite some time and after I moved to Miami, at home we got the following dogs:

9- Cocker

10- Sasha 

Both who are still around, Sasha at some point had puppies and my parents kept one of the puppies but the poor thing was born with a physical deformity on his neck and eventually passed away.

Alf died around 2004/2005 (can't recall exactly when right now, but I'll do my due diligence for Alf's story) and I moved to Miami in 2008 and my first pet I got after Alf, was a hamster called Bubba, whom I decided to adopt from a friend as a way to help his mom.  I knew a rat was not going to last for long, but God damn, when he died, that's when I found out that you could cry for a rat.

Afterwards, I kept myself pet-free due to heavy travel for work and leisure and it never cross my mind to get pets, and if at some point I would get one, it would have been a dog but well, I think I already told the story of the pet during the lockdowns, and now I find myself with 2 (almost 3) of my greatest companions at the moment, and each one of them deserves a full blown post: Taco, Pepe and why not, Lola, but those stories will be for another day.

The funny thing about all of them, is that they show, in their own way, love and comprehension that sometimes the ones closest to you fail to do and that's fucking awesome about pets.

NOTE: I'm not counting a few additional "pets" that we had at home like Guinea Fowls and a couple of Roosters, mostly because they were way too independent and we never really treated them too differently from the farm animals they were.