I've lived long enough to experience that sometimes you go looking for a pet and sometimes the pet finds you. In our lives it has been about half and half. Both ways work, but I have learned to pay attention to cues from the animals to see if they want me, too.
If you read, Alice the Cat, you saw my mention of Rosie, our basset hound in the story. Her story has to start with a bit of TV trivia that only the 60+ crowd will probably remember. In the mid-50's there was a half-hour show called:
'The Peoples Choice' that starred Jackie Cooper, former childhood actor as "Socrates 'Sock' Miller, a Bureau of Fish and Wildlife ornithologist, is elected city councilman of Barkerville, a California housing development. Sock secretly marries his girlfriend Mandy and they then try to hide the marriage from her father, the Mayor. In addition, Sock has an unusual basset hound named Cleopatra (Cleo to her friends) who can talk and comment on her master's actions. The show aired for three years from 1955 to 1958."
Read More