Pets

At the moment we have 16 pets, three cats en thirteen goats. Each animal has his or her own personality and I try to keep track of their lives on this website, by updating their story every other month.

Poes, who died a few years ago, was our oldest cat, we adopted him from a friend of mine. He is still missed, because he was very curious what we were doing, so we give him the nickname "The inspector". I took Kimba in house when he was just a kitten of 6 weeks. At that time, that was no problem, since I was looking for a job and spend quite some time at home entertaining him. He is a real cuddle-cat.

When we bought our first home, we took in a young lady, Bibi. She is part British Shorthair and sometimes quite white (but mostly not). When she came in our house, she was a little bit too young and we were both working fulltime, so Kimba became her fostermother.

Four years later, we adopted Okkie. He was a spotted Bengal. Unfortunately, Okkie went missing in 2005. We still miss him a lot. He was a great cat to see, a lovely coat and he had a spectacular body. But the best part was his personality. He loved to wonder around, and sometime he became a kitten again and could sit for hours on your lap.

When Okkie was two, his half brother Murphy was born. When I saw his picture, I fell immediately in love with him and 14 weeks later he joined our group of cats. He was quite different from his older brother, not only because of his coat, but specially because of his karakter. He always wants to sit on your lap, he loves to investigate what you are doing. And if you are not looking and you have turned your back to him, he jumps now and then on your shoulder.

Since October 2005 we increased our petstock with two angora goats, a young female and a young male. Heron is the dominant male and tries to bully his half-sister around, but Diana fights back. They become more and more cuddly, now they know who we are.

20 May 2006, our pet stock increased again. Quite unexpected, a baby goat was born. We called her Mariken, after an old dutch folk tale.

We have bought two new minature goats. We named them Aafke and Betty. We all our still in the phase of becoming familiar with each other. We with Betty and Aafke. And Betty and Aafke are still getting used to us and their fellow goats in the meadow.

Since our youngest goat was over 18 months, we decided it would be a good idea to buy one or two male goats for our ladies, with the hope to have a few young lambs in the spring. We finally decided to go for the angora male Fiedel and a minature male goat Charley.
Fiedel was already accepted after one day. The encounter between Charley, Aafke and Betty is less smooth. Betty keeps a big as possible distance between her and him. There are already signs that it is getting better, but is goes slower then we had hoped for.

Five months have past and three of our four lady goats were heavy with little ones. As expected, was Betty the first one to deliver. She gave birth to a baby-boy "Gert" and a baby-girl "Erica" on Wednesday 12th of March. Two days later, Aafke also delivered twins, two baby-boys, who we named "Jip" and "Isaac". On Sunday the 16th of March, Diana gave birth to two girls, "Kaatje" and "Lonneke". The birth itself went well, but the place she choose to deliver was cold, so the twins were to cold. Lonneke is almost completely well again and drinks with her mother. "Kaatje" is better, but not over the hills yet. She is drinking from a bottle, because she is not strong enough at the moment her mother keeps pushing her away. Hopefully, Diana will turn around when "Kaatje" is much better, otherwise we will have to keep feeding her with a bottle.