We started off with a Great Dane named Ben. We had a crazy guinea pig called Templeton. He was nuts. He'd escape from the hutch and run SO fast, it's amazing he never got away. We had numerous rabbits and guinea pigs for a few years, but Templeton sticks in my mind. We had an Eastern Rosella names Benson (after the Benson and Hedges cigarettes
), We had pieds, canaries, hundreds of budgies (not literally, it was just like a Hitchcock movie in the aviary though). We had a goanna which moved in with us and lived under a 44 gallon drum. I can't remember what we named him/her, but he/she was a cranky old thing. And huge. That old lizard hung around for a long time. I used to pretend it was everything from a dinosaur to a crocodile to a dragon. The 44 gallon drum was also my horse at one stage.
A fat horse which didn't move much...
The cats we had were probably the funniest. Tigger was a stray who was given to us by the local deli because the pub next door said she was a pest to the patrons in the beer garden. She was wild. She'd take off to a pair of pot smokers up the road and come back stinking of pot and not be right for a day or so. She often came home dragging rotting carcasses with her, like magpies, rats, small marsupial looking things
.. She lived to be about 18. She actually stopped coming back when she was about 17 or so, but we saw her months later and assumed she made it to about 18. We didn't know how old she was when she came home from the pub/deli, so we calculated based on how long we had her. We had Stussy, who was gay. He was madly in love with Matty, another cat of ours. Both were desexed. Matty was another story, but Stussy was this fancy looking Himalayan who my great aunt had to surrender due to moving into an old people's unit. We'd never seen a fancy cat like him before. He'd obviously never seen a ruggedly handsome tom like Matty. It was love at first sight. Matty was a tough old cat. About twice the size a cat should ever be, he attacked dogs and growled at people walking past our house. He was slightly confused about his role in life. He would sleep on my bed all night, and defend the fortress in the day. We've got a photo of him taking on and winning against a neighbour's German Shepherd. He lived to be about 18, and was only put to sleep about 4 years ago because of an illness that he was getting too frail to fight. I miss him so very much.