Jessica: The BeginningJessica: The Beginning
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My Cute Pet Page
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• I don't want more pets!
Of course I love all my pets, but we have never been the kind of people that go looking for pets to rescue. We just could never turn our backs on the ones we found on our way, we decided we can only save those that are on our path. I'm not in any local group about pets, I don't want to know about pets needing adoption, I can't take care of them all, and it hurts me.
As I'm the main caretaker, I know how much I sacrifice of my personal life for them. I swear the thought of "being free" had just crossed my mind in 2024, as I was having little to no social life, not going out that much (so my chances of hearing about or finding animals needing help was low), the last time I came across abandoned kittens was in 2017 (when I rescued Bel, Luke, Emma and Doralice), and our population was aging. I really thought that by the end of the decade I would be able to get a life... and then BAM! A fresh supply to take care of for at least another 15 years lol
I love them all deeply, but please, stop!
• I don't like calling them My pets.
I like to think that they are like, their own people, living their own lives. I just look after them, and they live with me - and sometimes, on top of me.
• My mom once rescued a monkey on our last farm. I wasn't living with her at the time, but the dogs were barking a lot, the type of barking when they are cornering some animal (we can tell). So she went out to look and found they had cornered and injured a capuchin monkey. She took a towel, dispersed the dogs, and talked to the scared monkey, saying she wasn't going to hurt him, she wanted to help him, and that she was going to pick him up and didn't want him to bite her. Then she embraced the monkey with the towel and took him inside. She called our vet and told him she had a monkey for him to look at. The guy was surprised and curious, and he took another vet with him, and they were both afraid of handling the monkey, thinking they would get bitten, so my mom handled the monkey for them to examine and hugged him like a baby while they gave the antibiotic shot. The wild monkey really understood he was being treated and behaved the whole time.
He was bitten by the dogs, but the injury wasn't serious, so my mom fed him and let him spend the night. Next morning she took him to the edge of the nearby forest, put him on the ground, and then started aggressively screaming, stomping the ground, and waving a stick to scare him and make him run away. This is called aversive conditioning. This wild animal might have thought that humans are cool, but that's not a good idea to have, humans are scum, and we knew for a fact there were hunters in the region, so it's better for him to be afraid of getting near humans.
• I once rescued a toucan. They are so beautiful!
We are living right next to a small creek, and from time to time we see toucans flying by. Once one fell in my backyard and was cornered by my dogs. I picked it up and took it outside for it to fly away. Its huge beak is really scary, it felt like it could rip my fingers off, or my nose, if it wanted.
• We occasionally took care of injured birds. We are against cages and we don't want to keep birds around anyway because of the number of cats, so we always released them once they were good. Once we also took care of a baby bat, and he lived with us for a few months. We would put him in a building next to our garage, where other bats would gather, but he would crawl back to our kitchen door. He would hang on my mom's shirt, and she would carry him around. Once she forgot he was in her shirt and went to the city. She was at a bank, and the teller said "Excuse me, lady, your brooch is moving", and my mom said "Oh, that's just my bat", and the teller started screaming lol
• One injured bird we took care of we named Cucurucu. We picked him up from the ground at a bar a few blocks from my house. We'd let bananas rot just so they would attract those super small fruit flies for him to eat. He was very cool and liked to sit on our heads and shoulders. After a few weeks he was flying very well, and we tried to put him back near the bar where we found him, but he kept flying back to us - eventually he got distracted and we slipped away.
• Before moving to our current place, we lived in two different houses right in front of a river, and tons of capybaras would show up at our fence every day. Capybaras are very cool, but they are full of ticks!
• Once a big-ass white heron landed on my fence and I was just there admiring it. Then I noticed it was staring at my cats a little too much, and realized how easily it could swallow one of them, so I shooed it away and started being vigilant about big-ass birds coming to our house.
• We had two tortoises in our second farm. They ran away!
• Once a tortoise showed up in our current house. It's near a creek but it's in the city, and we had no idea where it came from. I called animal control and asked what to do, they said tortoises walk long distances, and if I was near a creek I could just put it there and it would take care of itself. I just gave it some snacks (lettuce, tomatoes, bananas) and took it to the creek. A few years later the same tortoise showed up at my door again! (I know it was the same because it had a huge scar on one of the legs and I recognized it). This time I asked around the neighborhood and discovered it belonged to a family that lived in my block, but it had escaped and ran away (lol, we are not the only ones outran by tortoises). I even got their contact and sent them a picture, and they confirmed it was their tortoise, but this family was living some 2200 km away now. I couldn't keep the tortoise because my property is a sloped lot full of stairs. It was no wild animal and this wasn't its habitat, so I found someone nearby to take care of it, they had a huge backyard that already had a few chickens, geese, and peacocks, and they loved receiving the tortoise.
• Did you know that the Brazilian Wandering Spider is one of the most aggressive and venomous spiders in the world, and that if a man is bitten he can develop a thing called Priapism, which is a painful raging boner that won't go down for several hours and you need to go to a hospital so they can drain the blood from your boner with a needle? Also, did you know these spiders are EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE IN MY HOUSE!?
The farms I lived on didn't have as many spiders, scorpions, and snakes as the house I'm living in the city right now (although I'm the last house on the street, right next to a small forest). For years I thought about getting some chickens for pest control, but since the increase of the cat population after the Barbarian Invasion, the pests have not been such a big problem. The 9 years we lived in this house before that, though, I'd find Wandering Spiders inside our house every fucking week.
Wandering Spiders are very aggressive and they will try to pick a fight with you - yeah, they will run at you instead of from you, crazy little crackheads. But you know what, I guess I developed such an aura emanating such I-don't-give-a-fuck vibes that after some time they started being chill around me. I don't kill spiders (nor snakes or scorpions), I capture them and throw them outside (walled property). I mostly just put the plastic container right in front of them and say "Come on, get in," and they don't make a fuss.
Other spiders I find often are Wolf Spiders, and their prevalence changes from time to time. In later years I've been finding mostly Wolf Spiders... my theory is that they fight for territory, and as Wolf Spiders don't rely on venom they are better brawlers. Wolf Spiders aren't crackheads, they run and hide from you, but they also aren't troublesome to capture.
On a few occasions I found Tarantulas. In fact, I remember when we just moved I saw one climbing from the other side of the wall, and I thought it was someone's fingers trying to climb, but it was just a big-ass spider coming in. Tarantulas are chill as fuck, they are the coolest spiders.
• Encounters with scorpions are more rare, I guess they aren't that good climbers to come in. I have only found some very small ones, but they are more dangerous than the spiders. One day I was sitting right here where I'm sitting now in the living room and felt something crawling up my calf. I lifted my jeans and saw a scorpion, but I just shook it away and then captured it. This was actually the most dangerous encounter I had with a dangerous animal (which wasn't that dangerous really). I find spiders all the time but I never had any accident with any, my mom says it's Saint Francis' protection.
• I have found baby snakes quite a few times, they probably come in from below the garage door or the door I have in my backyard, and in the majority of cases when I find them the cats have already killed them. Just the other day I found an all-red baby Coral snake, no rings, and those are apparently pretty rare, but sadly it was already dead. Other species I found here are Jararaca, Jararacuçu, and Urutu pit vipers, like the Coral, all pretty fucking dangerous! - but the ones I found alive I just captured with a broom and a dustpan and released them outside.
One day, however, I noticed my cats all circling something outside, and I knew it was some animal that shouldn't be there, so I went to check and there, just a few meters from me, was a coiled adult Urutu Cruzeiro. You know that aura I just talked about? They say animals smell fear, and I don't let them smell that from me. I remember once a big-ass dog showed up on our farm, and as I was going to put food for my dogs I put a bowl for him too, then he growled at me and I instinctively instantly slapped his face and shouted something like "Shut up and eat!" and the dog put his head down and started eating. When I walked back inside I was like "WTF did I just do, that was some big-ass dog!" - only then I noticed it could have gone really wrong for me lol... anyway, back to the big snake: nope, I called animal control to pick it up hahaha.
Next day I installed a hard bottom seal on my garage door. At least adult snakes can't come in now.
You scrolled this far?
You just found the SECRET GALLERY.
Since I've been here on Neocities making tons of friends, I see people's pages and shrines for their pets, and everyone seems to like pictures of pets, so I thought perhaps I should make a page too, but... well, given my number of pets, I knew it would be no easy task and would require a lot of planning - I'm also struggling so much to translate silly expressions and adjectives to something idiomatic!
I also wanted to tell my history with pets, at least the main points. If I were to add every pet I ever had to my In Memoriam, there would be well over a hundred pets there (if I could remember them all!), so I'm only adding the ones I have pictures of and doing special mentions.
Believe it or not, I'm not one to take many pictures!
I have tons of pictures, but it's tons of pets over several years. There are days I take several pictures, and then years I don't take any. I noticed I mostly took pictures when they were small, sleeping in funny positions, or making funny faces. The number of pictures increased when I started having a cellphone with a camera in my pocket all the time (2019), but still I only took pictures of the cats that were always with me (mostly Saibot and Dali). Since the big rescue event we called Barbarian Invasion, I barely took any pictures, those are tons of new pets that I only recorded a few videos of to send to friends and relatives.
Every pet has its own personality. Some are very social, some very antisocial, and perhaps because some are so expansive and glued to us so much, others that distanced themselves could otherwise have been close to us... I don't know, but at any moment there were pets with a big presence and some that were just there. Those with a big presence marked us, so those are the special mentions of the In Memoriam.
Because I don't take that many pictures, there are several pets with a big presence that lived and died, and we didn't record them.
The '90s is probably when we had most pets living together at the same time, but I was born in 1989, so for obvious reasons I remember like only half of it and not that much. We have only a few photographs of pets of the period, it's not like film was super expensive so we couldn't take many, I guess we had a different mentality about taking pictures back then. If you weren't a hobbyist, pictures were more for important moments, else the camera would be in a drawer somewhere.
We have a few photographies from the early '00s, but around then we got our first digital camera, and there are a lot of pictures I remember taking, and I remember pets from that period much better, but they were lost in dead HDDs and memory cards, so the '00s remain only in our memories - and we had such beautiful pictures of Jessica among the flowers in the garden.
The oldest digital pictures we have are from 2010, and that's also when we picked the oldest cat we currently have, Dona Lupa.
My first 30 years of pets were just occasionally recorded, but the Neocities community inspired me to do better, and I hope you enjoy hearing about all these precious little things we saved and gave the best life we could :)