It seems that having animals is almost guaranteed to bring some guilty feelings into your life. Multiply the number of animals, and it seems the guilt multiplies as well.

There are times I feel guilty because the boys don’t get as much attention as I’d like to give them; certainly not as much as they got before Chester came into our lives.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love my boys any less, but the simple fact is that Chester eats up a lot of my time. I suppose that in reality the boys are used to that, as Puss ate up a lot of my time as well. I guess I didn’t feel as guilty about that because Puss was here before the boys — and Puss didn’t scare Gizmo away from me.

For instance, now that the tv season is over and the days are longer, I’m trying to take Chester for a late evening walk. We got back from one the other day, and Simba was laying in wait just inside the door, with Gizmo not far behind him on top of the recliner.

The boys are trained to walk on a harness and leash, too, but it’s awfully difficult to try to walk all three of them each day. In fact, I had stopped walking the boys because there were so many off leash dogs in our neighborhood. Now that our backyard is fenced in, I want to start walking them again — but how to find the time?

Simba, I know, really enjoyed his walks outside. On top of that, I feel guilty that the boys are still confined to the kennel, while Chester has the run of the backyard.

One solution would be to put cat fence-in on our fence. I worry, though, that if we ever have to move to a house without a fenced-in backyard, the boys would be very unhappy if they no longer had access to a backyard.

Even having just one animal brings the guilt. Chester loves to play with his doggy buddies when we board him at an in-home facility. I really think he’d love to have a doggy buddy, and that it might help his separation anxiety, but I’m not ready for another dog for a variety of reasons.

Today’s funny: animals do such silly things sometimes. I’ve fond of saying that my animals “earn” their keep by making me laugh every day. Chester did it today when I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk; he ran over to his carrier, which is in the hallway near my office — relatively far away from the back door. Yesterday we’d gone to the hike & bike trail for our walk, and that requires a car ride. I guess he liked that.

He’s also quite funny about the carrier. He jumps right into it — something I never trained — then promptly turns around and bites the grate. He knows that good things happen (mostly) when he gets in the carrier, but he doesn’t like being confined, apparently.

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