. Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 11/26/17> the search is over…update on Percy’s companion

Every time I see people posting about their dog, cat, bird or whatever pet they have I think, “Well they have flat run out of content”. So if you are like me and tend to think that way, just click off this post and find something else to occupy your time and then come back and see me tomorrow, this post is about the pets.

It is not that I have run out of content, these animals are a part of this old man’s and his family’s life. I have mentioned before that we recently lost Mrs. Knibbles and the search was on to find her sister, Percy, a suitable companion to help with what my girls called “her depression”, and while I said “I couldn’t see it” my girls assured me that they did, so I am happy to say that the search is over. We have a new member of the clan named “Squirt”.

Well, the story behind Squirt is that his former family had two guinea pigs that shared a big cage and his mate passed away recently. The family didn’t want to keep him as a lone wolf, but they didn’t want to get another because their kids had moved on from the pet guinea pig phase.

Being responsible people they elected to adopt him out and we were fortunate enough to find them. We pick the little furry Squirt up from them on this past Tuesday. Right now he is in his own cage and adjusting fine, Shortie , my daughter, is not going to rename him with a new name starting with a “W”, so I was flat wrong on that hunch.

We most definitely do not want to be raising little baby guinea pigs so why in the hell did we get a male guinea pig to keep Percy company? Good question and the answer is even better than the question. It also explains why the veterinarian, who Mrs. Knibbles went to before her demise, had a strange look on his face when he heard the name of our little darling.

When it comes to large animals like horses, cows and even dogs I have no problems telling the males from the females. When it comes to little fluffy critters the size of your hand, I may not be that good. In fact, I didn’t even check when I got Mrs. Knibbles and Percy, the lady who I got them from said they were females and that was good enough for me. I wasn’t about to turn them over and look at their privates.

As the search was under way for the replacement of Mrs. Knibbles my oldest daughter, Blondie, made a discovery that would end up sending our search in a whole another direction. It turns out the Percy has some “junk” that females aren’t equipped with, and since we have had Percy for over two years, it would make sense that Mrs. Knibbles probably had the same junk too. So, when the vet who was examining Mrs. Knibbles ask the name , and then gave us an odd look when he heard Mrs. Knibbles, it is probably because Mrs. Knibbles more than likely had the same junk as well.

So, mistakes can happen, but this is becoming the norm around here. I’ve never told this story that I am about to share because I always have “content”, but since we are this deep into animals I’m going to go ahead and share it too.

A couple years back I rescued a very healthy box turtle from the middle of a very busy road. I just can’t stand to see something so pretty end up splattered on the pavement, and it was certain that would have happened if I didn’t stop and pick this one up.

When I got home I was going to release it over in the gully but the girls fell in love with it. So Blondie, who was eleven at the time, jumped on the I-Pad and researched box turtles so that she and Shortie could identify if it was male or female. They made the determination that the turtle was indeed female and promptly named the turtle “Shella”, since that is a pretty name and she had a beautiful box turtle shell.

Last year my oldest boy came home with another box turtle that his boss had rescued from his swimming pool. So, back to the I-Pad for some more identification research, the girls determined we now had a male that needed a name, so the name picked was “Fred”.

Their research also said that it isn’t a good idea to keep the males and females in the same enclosure as the male will want to do some things that males like doing and basically wear the lady out chasing her around. We took the advice and kept them separated. Over the course of a couple months the turtles would always end up at the divider of the pen face to face and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. So we ended putting them together and sure enough the male started getting frisky with the female.

That’s alright, that is nature at work being nature, but the problem that we had was Shella should have been named Sheldon and Fred should have been named Fredrica. The girls’ flat ass got it backwards on the gender of both turtles. I’ll be the first to admit that I may not have done any better, I don’t know the first thing about turtle junk, but I do know about names. “Lucky” would have been my name for the first one, and “Backstroke” would have been appropriate for the second.
Until next time,
@sultnpapper
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