Taking the DARE Tuesday - by Bianca

Well, you have heard us mention several times that we once lived with a very adorable, hermaphroditic, ginger guinea pig named Fred. He had very floofy orange and white furs, and he was very funny. Mosaic Lady saw his cute little black and white photo in an ad for the Monterey Humane Society, and his eyes called to her. Before you could say: "Cavies like to crap on carpets!!" -- he was ours. The rest is pig-story! He didn't live with us very long 'cuz he got very sick very suddenly, but Mosaic Lady and we elder cats really loved him so much. We have old photos we must share with you when we can get to them. One is of me sleeping with Fred in his cage and the other is of me and Willie laying on a blanket on the floor with Fred in between us on the night he died. We were keeping a hospice vigil for him.

Mosaic Lady met Dark Oak Woman, Molly, online recently, and must've mentioned Fred 'cuz Molly invited us to come see her blog last week. Look what we saw!

Ginger (Gingerbread for long) in a HAT! We knew our fashion forward feline friends would flip! She lives in northeast Texas with a big family of five persons, FIVE other pigs, five cats, and three dawgs. Wow. That's some family, huh? Here she is on a very good hair day...


Ginger was adopted from a pet store where she was living (the kids who had her before got tired of her.) Molly's family adopted her so she could be a foster mom, or Auntie, to two little newborn pigs. Their mom, Luna, died right after giving birth and their Aunt Shimmer was also having a baby at the same time but she did not care for Luna's babies much at all. So now Ginger has three girls and two boys in her pig family. The girls share a cage and the boys have their own place across the living room, so no more babies! Phew.


We wonder if guinea pigs like sour blackberries? We sure pick a lot of them every day and saw a turtle gobbling some down yesterday in our yard. Molly has kindly offered to drop Shimmer off at our house during an upcoming trip to our 'hood, which is very nice and very tempting! We know Sadie would LOVE a little pig because she plays chase outside with all the baby bunnies who live around our yard. We know she really is playing with them and not hunting them because if her intention were to hunt them, there would be a big pile of bunny bodies at our back door by now.

Anyway...as much as we would all love a guinea pig to join our family, we suspect that if it ever happens again it will be much like the first time when Mosaic Lady gets wind of a pig who needs rescuing (Yes, she's already been on Petfinder looking! Did you even really have to ask?) But until then, it's really fun for us to have made six special new friends not of our own species!

Thanks, Gingerbread!
(and Shimmer, Basil, Moonshine, Rainbow and Magic Panda!)

(And thanks to Karl at The Cat Realm for creating such a wonderful and kind-hearted DARE!)