All The Pets I've Ever Owned

My family's first cat when I was little. He had long orange fur, and ran out of our car on a trip and we never saw him again...

My parents told us he came back when they got hold of a similar-looking cat. I admit I was fooled. He even pulled the same manoeuvre and we lost him from our car.

I was 8 when we got this cat. In spite of a soft-sounding name, this gray, long-haired cat was as tough as nails and got in all kinds of scraps during the night. He had a white tip on his tail.

I had a hamster for a while. Though Muffin didn't kill him directly, the hamster stress ran his wheel at all hours and eventually died.

A replacement hamster we had for all of a few weeks before he died too. We didn't get any more hamsters after that.

I bought a puppy from a classified ad as a present for my mom for Christmas. He was half-beagle half-labrador, but a little too excitable and he always ran off when we'd take him for walks. He was tolerated by Muffin, but broke out of our backyard and went on one of his jaunts when he was hit by a car. He died within days of my grandmother and it was one of my worst Christmases that year.

My brother brought Rascal (a brown tabby kitten) home from school as a 'temporary' foster. He and Muffin were like Master and Apprentice. Muffin died within a few years, and Rascal became the main cat of our family for what must have been around 15 years.

My wife's cat, she had him when we met, and he lived with us as we started our own family. He was initially called Kiwi, after my wife's love of New Zealand, but until a vet recommended a diet change, he had the most legendarily bad flatulence imaginable. He passed away about 8 years ago.

Our current cat, a Calico. We were going to foster her 'temporarily', knowing full well that these things are seldom temporary. She has a bit of a split personality, but her 'Jekyll side is very sweet.

When I realized how many pets I'd had in my lifetime, I wanted to count them up, thinking I would get to 10 easily. There may be a dog in our future, you never know. We also used to have a reciprocal arrangement with a cat named 'Obie' who could have been Stinky's brother. Obie's owner would watch Stinky while we travelled, and vice versa.