They leave footprints on my heart.........

I am an animal lover, love to have pets and have had all kinds of pets in my life,  from cats and dogs to birds, a tortoise and various stray animals that we have adopted and looked after. Each one of them has a special place in my heart. I often wonder and am amazed how the stray  animals always seem to find me, or for that matter, my father, my nephew and other animal lovers like us.

One year we found two helpless, newly born kittens in the backyard. Their mother had   probably died after giving birth to them. My father promptly arranged a baby feeder for them.  These little kittens grew up to be handsome cats. Another time a tiny baby squirrel appeared out in our front garden.

But the Robin chicks take the cake. Almost every year one or two chicks fall out of their nests but are too tiny to fly. They are rescued by my children. By now, even our pet dog knows that these chicks will find a place in our household. He creates a hullabaloo on spotting these little chicks fallen out of their nests, with the mother and father birds chirping at the top of their voices and various other birds creating a racket, sitting guard on nearby  trees and the overhead wires. One year two little chicks were rescued and brought into the house, as we could not locate their nest and put them back in. Also, the furious birdie parents hovering overhead made it impossible to locate the nest. We could not possibly leave them inside as they would have made a tasty meal for the stray cat. And so, as usual, they entered our house.               

It is not always that these animals survive, and when they die, they cause tremendous heartbreak.

I remember an incident from my childhood when an uncle and his friend went hunting and killed a doe, only to discover two helpless baby deer that they had made orphan. So each of them took one baby deer home. Some charity they did! The one that came to my grandfather’s farm was called Jack. He grew up to be a young and handsome deer, running around in the fields and at times destroying the crop, till one fine day the officials from the wildlife department turned up and took him away.  They put him in a zoo at Dehradun, as it was illegal to have a wild animal for a pet. For many years to come, we cousins visited the zoo to meet him and Jack would come running when we called out to him.

What amazes me is that why and how do these animals find a way into our household and our hearts, year after year. Perhaps it is nature’s way of sending them to people who care or it is simply that we see things that others don’t?