Nuestras Mascotas

No house would be complete with a pet or two, and our house in Honduras is no exception. When we arrived, (in addition to cockroaches, mosquitoes, mice, ants, and giant grasshoppers) our house came with a trusty, loyal, and useful guard dog named Oso… or at least that’s what we were lead to believe. We quickly discovered that none of words used in the previous sentence had ever or would ever be used to describe our mangy pet. Instead, words like lazy, useless, idiotic, clueless would most likely be used. It wasn’t even so bad that he was dumb (which he was in truckloads), but instead that he was just plain annoying (he would always escape, and instead of coming back when you would call him, would prance (literally prance) just out of reach from you as you chased him down the street with the dumbest look I’ve ever seen on any man or beast before (sorry for the venting there, but it had to be said)). I say this in all honesty as a person who loves dogs (I’ve had dogs since I was born and even worked at the Humane Society for the 4 years I was at college just to have some interaction with man’s best friend): Oso was the worst dog ever. Notice, I said was (don’t worry, we didn’t kill him). We endured as much as we could, but eventually he had to let him go (by this, I mean give him away to a neighbor).

But as a group that collectively liked animals (just not Oso), we couldn’t stand the idea of being pet-less. As such, we now have a new baby kitten who has already proved his worth by killing a nest of 4 mice. He is very ugly (he doesn’t have much hair and has a really big head), but as mentioned previous he is very useful (and actually fun to play with. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him “adorable” (the machismo Honduras culture wouldn’t let me), but he’s pretty awesome). Due to his startling appearance, we have named him Volidmo in reverance to the dark lord (the guys wanted to call him “Voldimort” while the girls wanted to call him “Minimo” (translation: banana), so we had a compromise). I’ll keep a tally of his kill count as the year goes on.