My friend who worked at the animal shelter text me a picture of a kitten. So I was planning on adopting her before I even got there. When I arrived at the shelter she was playing with another kitten. My husband insisted we adopt both. I didn’t put up a fight. 
First we picked the breeder. We spent a lot of time at dog shows, so we knew roughly who we would use, but once we visited their kennels we were rather surprised by what we found at a couple of them. (cracked dirt floors, hungry, scruffy, beta animals, that sort of thing.)
During each visit we also took a look at the lineage, and knocked out a couple more for what I’ve since learned to call pedigree collapse. At the time I just whispered that the same names were there too many times. . . We also took notes on who might be a good choice for a mate later on.
We found a bitch in heat with just the right surroundings and lineage, and put down a deposit for pick of the litter. Then we freely allowed ourselves to just pick the one we fell in love with. She was a Siberian Husky with fox-red markings and glacier-blue eyes. She later went on to win “Brood Bitch” at Westminster.
She was also a loving, intelligent, and sweet companion, and I miss her awful.
I went to the shelter wanting to look at adult cats and made the rounds of the various enclosures (the local shelter has large cages and such with multiple cats, not little cages except for sick or temporarily isolated ones) and was friendly with a number of cats, until I ran across Sapphire and she started making a huge fuss and made me pet and fuss over her for a good half hour. So, she being Siamese and my place quite small, I agreed to do a temporary foster; sort of a tryout period. I wanted to be sure she would let me sleep at night and wasn’t so vocal she would make me crazy; talkative is great, never shutting up, a bit of a pain.
I got her home and figured I wouldn’t see much of her for a day or two. Silly me. Within two hours she was on the couch here next to me, purring loudly. I had been an obedient human, apparently.
She does let me sleep at night, is actually very quiet for a Siamese except when she wants to be loud, and is all around a wonderful companion. I couldn’t have done better if I’d done the picking. Cats are good people-pickers.
My chihuahua was given to me by someone who owned females, to watch after him so he wouldn’t impregnate his female offspring. Eventually, he became ours.
My (miniature) dachshund was actually bought. But it was a piddly amount once a month for a while.
But I also want to tell you about a dog I no longer have: a mutt that looked like a white lab. We picked him up at a Sonic in my college town, 2 hours away. We were apparently the first people to be nice to him. He was well-behaved. We just felt sorry for him and were going to try to find him a new home (he’d been living at Sonic for over a month, but stayed pretty well fed). Unfortunately, he ran away.
When i adopted my cat, i already had 2 beagles who hunt squirrels and little critters. I did not think it would work out.
First night Boris stayed in the back room of the basement with food and kitty litter. I opened the door the next day and he walked right between the dogs like they did not matter. Since then, absolutely no trouble. You never know.
I had always wanted a cat. I love all animals, but honestly for me a cat is the only animal worth owning. I’m not a fan of the heavy maintenance that comes with a lot of animals, but cats are easy. I have always loved every cat I’ve ever met.
It took me several weeks to talk my husband into it. When we mentioned to a friend that we were looking into getting a cat, she offered me one of hers. He wasn’t really working out for the home environment because he was bullied by three larger cats and two dogs.
I thought having a black cat might be kind of boring, but beggars can’t be choosers. I took him and as soon as I got him home he was in my lap purring up a storm. He is the biggest cuddliest softest most affectionate cat I have ever known. We’ve had him about four years and I love him to death.
I was browsing in the pets section of Craigslist thinking that maybe I’d find something, maybe not. My thought was that, after my last cat had died, I wanted to try and correct some mistakes I’d made the first time around and get two cats this time. They can keep each other company when I’m at work or traveling. I also wanted to get kittens because I’d just had a cat die and didn’t want another one dying for a really long time.
So I came across a posting for two cute little orange kittens. They were from the some litter, one boy and one girl. At the time, they were 12 weeks old, already litter trained and already had an appointment to be fixed. I just had to go for it. They’re causing trouble in my bedroom right now, 16 months later.
We have an orange tabby named Monty. He was picked and named by my daughter.
Well, not really “picked”.
The cat was originally owned by people who lived in the same townhouse development where my daughter lives with her mother.
During Easter of 2008, they went out of town for a week, leaving the cat (who was at the time about a year old) outside to fend for itself. My daughter noticed this and started feeding him and letting him come into the house (it was still winter outside).
When the owners got back to town, she went over and reamed them out, and told them they didn’t deserve to own a cat or any other animal, and that she was going to keep the cat.
I guess they were so flabbergasted to be “torn a new one” by a 16-year-old girl, they didn’t protest the issue.
She already had three cats, so the next thing I know, she’s on the phone telling me about it, and that I “have to” take this cat. We were in the market for some kind of housepet, so we did.
Cat #1, neighbor kid brings kitten by the house when TurboPup and I were out (at a Harry Potter book party) giving TurboDog a big song and dance about this kitten is an orphan and her mom had been hit and killed by a car. TurboDog held the kitten up and snorted her fur to be sure she didn’t aggravate his allergies and shrugged and took her in, thinking he’d get a cat that was his.
Kitten took one look at out 12 year old son when we came home and fell completely in love. She is most definitely TurboPup’s cat and worship the boy. She waits for him to come home from school and curls up on his chest and licks his face. He named her Minerva.
Last year, I decided I wanted another cat. I went to two vets who adopt out kittens and checked them out for awhile. All the kittens were sweet, but I needed a short haired female cat and was hoping for orange.
Third week, I went back to one of the vets and they had a new batch of kittens they’d picked up from a local high kill shelter. I woke the kitties up to inspect them one by one…well once I woke this one little grey and black tiger striped girl, she was desperate to get out of the cage and near me. She even hung on the bars and positively screamed at me. She was not the cutest kitten, in fact she had weird look about her, like she was a tiny very old cat rather than a 7 week old baby. Her fur felt rough and wiry, more like a squirrel than a cat. But, she had picked me (I doubted anyone else would have chosen her) and I took her home right then. When I found out she’d been born 4/20, her name couldn’t be anything except Hai.
I am still definitely mom to Hai, who’s not a year old and not quite as odd looking as she was. She’s also blessed with an excess of personality and purrs like a tractor every morning to wake me up. My favorite thing she does though, is when a blanket is tossed over her, after playing madly for about a minute, she’ll fall asleep like a little bird. In the winter she sleeps under the blankets because her fur is so un-catlike and she can’t get warm enough.
In the thirty-odd (some of them really odd) years I’ve been owned by cats I can honestly say that I’ve never “selected” any of them. Most have been strays that friends found and passed on to me rather than take them to a shelter; my current two year old black cats Mischief and Rascal were only four weeks old when I got them, and they had to be bottle-fed for the first week or so. For a while I had two three-legged cats which my wife’s foster-sister was going to take to a shelter because no one else would take them and we figured that the odds were they would be put to sleep, so we said we’d find homes for them instead. We weren’t two blocks from the house when my wife looked at me and said, “We’re keeping them ourselves, aren’t we?”
We had two that we inherited when a friend died, and several from litters because we had neglected to get their mothers fixed in time. (I swear that we had honestly forgotten that one of our male cats had never gotten fixed because he was so laid-back. We remembered when we caught him mounting one of the aforementioned three-legged cats.)
My husband and I decided that our fifth anniversary present would be a cat. Rather than go out and look for one, we waited for one to come to us. Within a few weeks, I overheard a couple of friends talking about cats. One of them knew someone who had found a stray kitten but couldn’t keep it. When I heard the description of this kitten- mismatched eyes, no tail, wandering around getting lost- I just knew she was the cat for us.
I wanted a dog that was smart and very loyal. I researched many breeds and settled on a blue heeler. Then I looked on the internet until I found one that someone was giving up for adoption.
She is the best dog I’ve ever had. Very sweet, gentle and smart and loyal.
My last half-dozen picked me.
Pretty much all the dogs and cats we had as kids were either strays or from a litter of a pet of somebody we knew.
Cat 1: Found while biking.
Cat 2: Found at a horse farm.
Cat 3: Found on Petfinder.
Dog 1: Found on Petfinder.
Last four cats have been found as a kitten outside. The First one, someone went out of there way to throw her in one of those large green dumpsters with the slanted walls, so there was no way but human help she ended up in there. Gave her 12 good years with us before she passed. The last 3 have all been in the last 3 years. One meowing in the middle of the night, while I was outside in the summer. Power had gone out, went outside to cool off, heard her found her, scooped her up. Then two years ago two brother kittens were running around the neighborhood with no mom or anything. We grabbed one and brought him in, then that night I used one of those little box traps with a bit of food and kept an eye out. The second came to eat at about 7am, grabbed him and brought him in. One big happy family with the dog that my girlfriend picked out.
I had been wanting a cat for ages, ever since I moved away to college. Finally, I graduated, moved into a place that allowed pets, and waited for my finances to settle down. One day, I couldn’t take it anymore, and decided that I was ready to go to the pound. I spent the rest of the afternoon at work looking at every single cat on petfinder in my city. I started to laugh at myself, because I thought every single cat on there was the most adorable thing ever, and how was I supposed to choose one if I was cooing over just their pictures? I was a little gratified, though, when I got to the very last picture of this weird patchy tortoiseshell, because I didn’t think THAT one was cute. At least I had some taste. Yeah.
She drools, likes socks and pancakes, and wants to sleep under the covers with me at night. My boyfriend maintains I picked out the weirdest cat in the entire shelter. He’s probably right.
The last one that I actually picked out was almost 13 years ago. My then-husband had been itching for a dog, but I insisted that we wait until at least a few weeks after the baby was born before adding another living thing to the household. When the baby was 3 weeks old, the veterinarian down the street hosted an animal adoption day. We went, and I crawled around on the ground with various dogs. One very shy fellow, an adult male lab/German shepherd mix, struck my fancy: He was very, very gentle, but carried a lot of scars and was a little bit skittish. He was the right dog for me, though. We brought him home that day.
Within a day or two of coming home with us, Scooby accidentally knocked down a table with a bowl on it - my favorite hand-made bowl, which was the first piece of art I bought for myself after getting my own place. Smashed to bits. The dog was petrified - cowering in a corner, shivering. I cried and soothed the dog and promised myself that he would never, ever suffer under my protection.
He was an absolute love of a dog, wonderful with the baby/toddler and with adults and older kids. Unfortunately, an accident of the unforeseeable/unavoidable type took him from us much too soon. He had a good life while he lived with us, though.
Otherwise, my dogs have mostly chosen me: One stray scooped up by the side of the road as a pup (he’d been hit by a car, I begged the vet to work with me on payments, just please save the puppy!) The vet didn’t think he’d make it, but Jake and I spent a wonderful 16 years together until last summer. A few years later, Jake brought me another puppy that he found by the side of the road. My current dog was chosen by my husband before we married. He’s a narcotics K9, but nearing retirement, so he’s more and more my big footwarmer/companion these days.
We’ll pick out another dog to train for K9 work soon. I’m really pushing for a rescue vs. buying from a breeder, but I’m not sure that my husband is convinced that’s the best course of action…
I found Max the Bad Bulgarian Cat at the corner of Akatzia and Osvobozhdenie in my village. He was a tiny, filthy, flea-covered kitten, and he was following some woman around. She kept pushing him away with her walking stick. I kneeled down, and he ran over to me. I petted his head, and he began to purr maniacally.
As I’m generally not a big fan of cats, I figured this would work - I could leave him behind when I returned to America. After all, how attached to a cat would I get?
That went…well, let’s just say that Max has flown nearly ten thousand miles in his little kitty life. :smack:
I was taking a walk on my lunch break. I passed a small wooded area and this little ball of fluff puppy came running out growling and barking at me like she was gonna rip me to shreds.
I could see she needed a friend so I coaxed her over and carried her back to work because she wouldn’t walk on the hot asphalt.
Best thing that ever happened to me. She’s a peach.