[KevinFromTexas]

Yeah, it's funny. Some people say they're just "pets" but I see them pretty much in the same way I do a child, at least in that they're an innocent creature in my care. You don't get that desperation of continuing your genes and protecting them for that like you do with children, but you still have a need to protect them just like a child.

We had a family cat named Putty about 16 years ago that just up and disappeared. He was a huge white cat that would lounge around our yard. I mean he was king of the place. He'd wander over to my grandma's house nextdoor to get petted while they had their coffee on the front porch, and he'd steal a few pieces of kibble here and there. But he was very loyal to us despite being a fairly wild outdoor cat. I mean he actually fought off a raccoon in our driveway once, got hit by a garbage truck (no joke), and was asleep behind the wheel of my dad's truck and got run over then too. My dad had his truck parked in the street next to the curb. Well, Putty was asleep in a pile of leaves next to the curb on the passenger side of course, and my dad never saw him. He actually survived getting run over twice, though the garbage truck broke his hip. Anyway, one winter around Christmas he just disappeared. We drove all around our neighborhood and around South Austin looking for him. I remember my dad saying we drove 100 miles that week looking for him just every day going out to look and looking everywhere. Staring up driveways, yelling his name. We went to the pound looking for him, put up fliers, put an ad in the paper. But then one day we woke up and he was outside in the yard. We think maybe someone had brought him inside. I remember it being cold that winter, so I guess they let him in. He passed away in 1994 from Kidney failure. He was about 13 or 14 I believe.