Can We Keep It? Please!

I bet everyone has heard these words… Can we keep it? Maybe the “it” was a kitten, cat, or dog, or any other type of animal. I know when my kids were younger, they used to “find” stray animals one way or another. Or one of our meaningful friends or neighbors would happily give my children one of their cats from their over-populated home. And we most definitely got a lot of our animals with the lines, “Look what I found. Can I keep it?”

Some of the other animals that lived with us were dumped off in our yard, and my kids would find them huddled and freezing in front of our garage doors, or in front of our front door. Sometimes, I would go into one of their rooms where the door was tightly shut and I would hear a strange noise. I would open the door and find a kitty or even a dog behind door #1.

One time our piano teacher gave my kids a mother cat and her two kittens, which lived under her porch. Another time, we took in a full blown Irish Setter for a friend who was moving away and couldn’t keep the dog. That lasted for less than a week because someone in our house was allergic to dogs, and the big playful Irish Setter scared some of our little ones. Eventually, though, we owned our share of cats, turtles, fish, rabbits, iguana, and more.

But whenever I would hear those horrifying words - “Can we keep it?” - I felt a cold hand of terror clutching my heart. It was just one more thing to take care of in my overwhelming life of kids and animals.