The Diaries of a Fruitcake in a Half Baked World!

Growing up, I saw the way people treated their animals. Some let them inside the home and some didn’t allow the animals inside but had them outside for guarding purposes. A close family member at one time mentioned that animals didn’t have feelings so they just treated them however they wanted to.

I have seen on the local news how pet owners treat their animals, whether it be chaining them to a tree or leaving them out in the winter months or having them trained to attack other animals, which is illegal. I’m here to tell you that animals do have feelings! Looking at those examples, humans treat other humans the same way. People have been chained to something to work or stand guard, people have been left outside in the winter months, people have been trained to do bad things to others. Are we really that much different? read More >

For the last day of 2008, while my husband and teenage son were on the first row, in the end zone watching Vanderbilt play against Boston College in the Music City Bowl, I took my teenage girls to a movie. We decided to watch Marley & Me in the Governors Square Mall off Wilma Rudolph Blvd. I had heard that the ending was sad, so I didn’t really want to go see this one but we did.

I was pleasantly surprised by a crazy, insane dog that liked to tear up the house and eat the furniture, even the floor! It made me think, “This dog is special. Not all animals are like this.”

They got their ‘clearance puppy’ as the next step after their marriage, instead of babies. It reminded me of my husband and I when we got married. Our first addition to the Agnew clan was Cocoa, a deer chihuahua. With long legs and big ears, she looked like a rat as a baby but grew into her own. She was so faithful and loyal but not very obedient, which led to her death. She was 8 years old.

We had left on my Grandpa’s tractor to go fishing, (this is in Alabama) and Cocoa was in the fenced-in yard but somehow got out to try and follow us (so we assume, we didn’t see her). When we got back she was hiding in some bushes. We had thought she got hit by a car and took her to the Vet immediately. As we were waiting for the results of the x-rays, I was looking through her coat and saw teeth marks and that is when we realized she was attacked by a big dog, according to the markings. The Vet gave us some pain medicine for her but she died the next morning in our arms. It was very hard to let go of our first addition to our family. Because of my experience, I could associate with the characters and their feelings with their “baby”.

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