Things Mom raised in her living room

There was never a time that we didn't have some kind of animal babies in the house. Mom was always trying to earn a little extra money to help out with the household bills, since Dad was the only one with a job, and was always getting laid off, until he finally died in 1971. After that, getting this extra money was critically important.



Someone gave Mom an entire litter of German Shepard mix puppies. They were really young and shouldn't have left their mother yet, but I think it was one of those things where the man of the house said, "they go now, or else," so we got the whole box of them. They needed bottle feeding for about a week, and then they were ready for the pablum and powdered eggs. This is my little sister Tabatha. She liked bottle feeding the puppies, even after they were weaned. They were really easy to sell, and were all sold in one weekend.



Mom also bred parakeets. She had two huge floor to almost ceiling cages built, and they were kept in the front room. In one cage, rabbits lived on the floor of the cage with the parakeets. Our parakeets were gorgeous. Some were English, which are a little bit bigger than the Australian ones. We made sure none of the males were green, which is the dominant color. We had all sorts of colors, from white, to yellow, to sky blue, to light mint green, and lots of multicolored ones. We sold them to the local pet store.



Another weird thing that grew up in our living room. Quails. These gentle little birds were used for their eggs, which I guess were a delicacy to some people. So we raised these little things up in order to get their teensy little eggs to sell. these ended up being more trouble than they were worth.



We raised lots and lots of poodles. This is one of the silver litters.



Here we are with 3 litters consisting of 2 Poodle puppies and 5 Manx kittens. Manx cats are in my opinion the greatest cats. Besides being different in that they are missing all or part of their tails, these cats are friendly, like to be with the family, even when we go dog walking, and they never threw up hairballs in the house.



We had a mother rabbit who burrowed under the front yard and had babies. One day, a neighbor's dog got ahold of her and ripped her to shreds. We dug into the ground and found the surviving babies, and Mom bottle-fed them until they were big enough to be sold. They were so tiny and cute.



Some of our beautiful red Poodle puppies. These were very popular in the 1970s and 1980s.



Here is one of the living room cages that we had cockatiels. Mom bred grey and yellow ones, and hand raised the babies so they would be friendly.



Here is Piper, my Mom's handraised Cockatiel.




Here is the other living room cage, with Mom's parakeets.


We also had an incubator to hatch chicken eggs. The chicks and the kittens used to play together and sleep together.



Reminds we of that quote from the Bible that in the coming days, the lion shall lie down with the lamb.



One of the few chicks that we named. Cluck-cluck.




The incubator with baby cockatiel and eggs.




A bumper crop of chickens in the playpen in our living room. We always had something being born, hatching, or toddling around right there with the rest of us.