My daughter, Danielle, had an amazing affinity with animals when she was younger. Her childhood was filled with all kinds of different pets. I will not forget the time I came home from work one day when she was in junior high in Athens. There she was on the front porch loving on a huge orange and white Tom cat. I think the cat was doing just as much loving back. Her first comment? “Look what followed me home!” Her second comment? “Can we keep him?”

Considering that we already had several cats and a couple of dogs, I gulped and tried to say something more constructive than “NO!” After all, she was a tween.

While I was thinking of the proper response, I thought back to her other animal exploits. When she was in elementary school, she shared her bedroom with an injured crow. She had spied him hopping around in our back yard in Niota, unable to fly. I am not sure who had the messiest space, Dani or the crow (which we named Charlie). She was fascinated with him.

One night a neighbor’s horse decided to come calling and tried to walk in the back door that led to her bedroom. To this day I don’t think it was a coincidence. At one time or another most of our dogs and cats received the benefit of Dani’s fashion designs.

When we moved to Athens, it didn’t take long before she found out a neighbor raised lop-eared rabbits. She went over to George and Connie’s house and came back begging us to let her buy a bunny. I pointed out that we had three cats and two dogs; that dogs like to chase bunnies, and that Butch, our dog, had killed a muskrat in our backyard recently. I hoped to dissuade her. It didn’t work. She wanted a bunny for her pet. The others were ‘our’ pets. She pointed out that her brother, Tommy, had a hamster of his own. Then came the revelatory comment, “I can buy him with my own money. I have eight dollars.” I am such a pushover, my husband even more so. So we said she could get the bunny but that she had to clean his poop and keep him fed and watered. She marched over to George and handed him the eight dollars. She came home with Buffy, a beautiful black and white spotted male rabbit and George followed her with a free cage. We set it up in the backyard on cinderblocks next to the shed.

Dani took good care of her bunny. The poop job was sometimes done reluctantly, but most of the time it was done. As Buffy grew into a huge, but very friendly rabbit, our daughter worried that he was confined in a cage that was now too small for him. She figured out he could hop down cinderblock stairs she set up so he could wander around the yard. I thought we were soon going to have a bunny funeral, but a couple of eyeball to eyeball chats with the dogs and Buffy had the run of the yard. The dogs treated him like a smaller version of themselves. The cats enjoyed sleeping against his luxuriously soft fur. Our rabbit never had a desire to try to escape. Dani often said, “I told you so!”

So what happened to the big orange cat? After we put up posters, checked in the lost column of the local paper, and received no calls, we had another cat. Tigger joined the other members of the menagerie and added his personality to all the critters that called our house home.

Susan Kite, a member of AGT, is the author of five young adult books. https://www.amazon.com/default/e/B00J91G0ZU/