Being a pet sitter comes naturally to me. I have loved animals since I was a child, and this blog is a story of my pet sitting journey. That kid in the photo is me when I was 4 years old in Connemara, Ireland. The cat in the photo is Pinta who was a well-fed barn cat who spent his days hunting mice and rats. I had a very fortunate and wonderful childhood growing up in the west of Ireland.
I feel fortunate that I got to experience life on a traditional farm from a very young age. My grandparents lived on an island on the west of Ireland where I spent all the summers of my youth. They had chickens, geese, cows, calves, a donkey, sometimes a horse and always a dog or two, and of course Pinta the cat, pictured above.
I started learning how to care for animals when I was about 4 years old when I was introduced to my grandparent's farm in the early 1970s. One of the first tasks that was entrusted to me was to drive the cattle to their grazing spots in the morning and go retrieve them in the evening. My grandmother then used to milk them by hand, squirting the milk into a metal pail. Pinta would get a bowl of that milk for his dinner, and for the longest time, I thought cats only drank milk and hunted mice and rats. Nowadays, I know that milk is not good for cats.
But milk is not always bad for animals. I once nursed a dog back to life with just milk. My dog had followed my siblings to school and got hit by a car. His windpipe had been damaged by the accident and I did not think that he was going to make it. My mother thought that it would have been best to put him down, but I begged her not to and although he suffered for a few days with little food, I gave him milk to drink, and he survived on that until he could start eating food again. He lived a long life after that incident.