Pets and strays

When I was a kid in NYC the only pet I had was a parakeet, so when I came to Israel I wasn't prepared for the amount of pets roaming around the Kibbutz.

At the beginning we started out with cats. One of my friends gave me a cat and assured me it was a male (what did I know?) so we named it Oscar. Well, Oscar as you have already guessed, turned into a female Oscar, and we had kittens (tongue in cheek!) and for about 8 years we kept kittens until one day one of my children asked if she could have a puppy. NO! was the consensus, so of course she brought home a puppy. And that puppy stayed "one week" in our house until she could find it a home, which in reality was 5 years until somebody disappeared the dog (no, I didn't make a mistake in grammar!).

However, after that the house didn't feel quite the same, so my husband went to the Israeli SPCA and came home with a mongrel white terrier, a wonderful "doormat" of a dog, just what a house with 4 kids needs. We had the dog a long time, and when she died, I sent my husband to get another dog and told him "I don't care what you bring home, just don't bring home a pinscher" - unfortunately the only thing he remembered was the word "Pinscher" and came home with a beautiful little dog - a pinscher. There were only two small problems - we couldn't eat anything because she would jump up and take it out of our hands and she would deposit little presents on the floor no matter how many times we took her out. We eventually had to return her to the SPCA and traded her in for ...another white terrier.

After that dog died I said I didn't want any more dogs, enough was enough, but one day a very cute white-beige terrier showed up on the grounds of the school near where I work - meaning she was thrown away by whoever owned her before. She came to "visit" where I worked, must be fate or kismet or something - I took one look at her and fell in love with her, but I put her back outside saying, no, not again. A few hours hours later, my son on his way home from the Army called and said "Mom, I hope you have room for a dog in the house" and I knew that he had met the same dog I saw earlier in the day. So that's how Mocca arrived in our house.

The bigger issue is how people can throw away animals in the first place - how can they take female dogs/cats, not neuter them and then throw the dogs away when they get pregnant - or throw the animals away if they have to go abroad - or just don't feel like taking care of them any more? What kind of lesson are they teaching their children?


Tell me, how can anyone throw a dog like this away?