Here is a picture of my beloved
significant other pet cat Scamp (alias: Mr. S), a light-coloured ginger tabby. He was given to me as an ickle little kitten upon my eighth birthday, making him fourteen years young and my childhood/adolescent life partner. He's a cream-and-catnip junkie and possibly a misandrist...it's odd, but while he's always been super-affectionate toward my mother and myself, he usually recoils whenever my dad or brother try to touch him (but I guess the four of us are too small a sample to know for sure). A bona fide poser who spends his days patrolling his territory and rolling around the grass on his back, so that his attractive white belly is on display and game for a tickling, and his nights snuggled up on my pillow, practically shoving my own head off. Which I don't mind, since I like having his warm, purring, vibrating body pressed up against me. Yeah, you go, you handsome devil you.
And here's my other delightful bundle of feline fluff - Cleopatra (alias: Cleo). She comes from the same litter as Scamp, and originally belonged to my brother, but now that he's moved away from home and started a new life elsewhere I've more-or-less inherited her. Unlike her older sibling, who has an adventurous and independent side to his nature, Cleo is a generally rather nervous and insecure (not to mention highly vocal) little creature who gets easily startled and constantly craves human company. She's also extremely playful, universally friendly and ever so affectionate - in other words, the sweetest little being on the planet:
I used to have a dwarf rabbit named Stanley - the first pet I ever owned, and one who'll always hold a very special place in my heart - but he passed on long before the age of the digital camera, so the most I could possibly show you would be a few scanned blurry snapshots of him sitting upon the lap of my six-year-old self (which I'm not keen on doing
). I am truly sorry to hear about everyone else's losses because I know from Stan's death how painful it is to lose a pet - I had no idea how hard it was going to hit me. It's also very painful for me to acknowledge that I'm probably much closer now to the end than to the beginning with Scamp and Cleo.
Not sure if she counts as a pet exactly, but at one point I did also have a sickly baby hedgehog a friend had picked up as abandoned and which somehow wound up in my hands. I named her Nettle and attempted to rear her myself, but sadly she died after a couple of weeks. She had always been very weak and, even more harrowingly, didn't appear able to use her back legs, which possibly accounts for why she was abandoned in the first place.
Raising a baby mammal is certainly no picnic. Not only do you have to supply them with nutrients every few hours (in Nettle's case, heated goats' milk through a pipette...cows' milk + hedgehogs = DISASTER), but you have to enable them to relieve themselves yourself by running a damp cotton bud around the appropriate areas (in the wild, their mothers would apparently just lick them
).