I remember it well. Shortly after moving to our two acres in Westhaven from LA, Michael said “Look at all that blackberry! We should get a couple of goats.” We had a barn and a pen and lots of overgrown yard, so it seemed a good idea. After calling around, off he went in his truck and brought home an Alpine d...

My sweet rescue dog was incorrigible. A born troublemaker. I had jury duty, so I took Penny back to the school where, after adoption, she’d completed three weeks “basic training.” They’d deemed her a classic Beagle with a hound mentality — an independent thinker, stubborn, willful and ADD besides. On this day...

Anyone who has spent time with animals of any kind knows that there is something so honest, so nurturing and calming about them. That’s why we have therapy dogs and horses, and emotional support animals of all species— animals have a healing spirit. In fact, researchers find that being with animals increases ...

We dearly loved our bloodhound fur child Katie, who was our heart girl and a therapy dog as well. We were devastated when cancer took her. My husband, Charlie, died five months later. He broke his ankle in Mammoth Lakes and we were flown to Reno when an operable heart condition was discovered. Charlie got COV...

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx

The title is from a friend about a pet and living by yourself. I had been living alone for a couple of years when my 18-year-old cat decided it was time and went off and found a fern to expire under. After a suitable period of mourning, I decided it was time for another cat. I was looking for a mellow cat and...

I have always loved dogs. My childhood dog was a mutt named Brownie that had traveled across the country with my brothers and mother before I was born. He would walk me next door and wait outside while I visited at the neighbors and then walk back home with me. Like so many childhood memories, he looks much s...

If you want someone who will eat whatever you put in front of him and never say it’s not quite as good as his mother’s … then get a dog. If you want someone always willing to go out, at any hour, for as long and wherever you want … then get a dog.

For many older adults, pets are more than companions. They greet us each morning, encourage us to go for walks, comfort us during tough times and give us love and a sense of purpose. So losing them can feel like a profound loss. But others often minimize the loss of a pet. Friends might say, “You can get anot...

I was enjoying a foggy evening at home when I got an email from a friend telling me she was so sad because she knew her eldest dog’s life was coming to a close. I asked her if she had a good vet who would be kind and gentle and she replied yes and described the vet to me.

The old folder lurked in the back of my storage shelves. Thirty years had passed since I had filled it with papers found among my mother’s things. My aunt had convinced my mother to write a story about the cats she had when she was a child. Was this it? She had used a pencil and whatever scrap paper was avail...

Maggie is a Boston Terrier/Chihuahua mix who lives with Gisela Colbert at Timber Ridge in McKinleyville. She is 17½ and has been Gisela’s constant companion since she was an even tinier puppy.

Humboldt’s own Obon Festival brings Japanese Buddhist tradition that is over 1,400 years old to Arcata’s Creamery District on 9th Street in August with a dazzling wealth of performances, activities and other attractions to honor the spirits of our ancestors. The 2026 annual festival on Sunday, Aug. 16, 3-7 p....

I’ll begin with 1975 — a jackrabbit roadkill, skinned and trimmed and three days in a marinade. Guests are invited to the feast. A silent form enters through the door, leaps onto the counter and then off, prompting Nancy to announce, “Your cat, I believe, is escaping with the hasenpfeffer.” That would have be...

Once upon a time, many years ago (1966), I worked on a dairy farm in Sussex, England. My two buddies, John and Paul (not THAT John and Paul!), had quit teaching agriculture to start a dairy. I was milking 75 Jersey cows a day. It was pretty exciting stuff for a city boy from Los Angeles. About 10 years later,...

Years ago, I went to Winco with Bella, our slim, greyhound-like pit bull, to pick up a few things for dinner. When I got back to the car, I realized I’d forgotten something, so I put the groceries in the back of the car, ruffed up Bella’s scuff a bit and went back into the store. On the way back to the car, a...

We are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic — in 2023, the U.S. surgeon general declared loneliness a public health crisis. Most of us feel it. We swipe, we scroll, we text and somehow we end up more disconnected than ever. I have felt it, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

The ongoing terrible news about a well-known animal rescue in Fortuna reminds us that Humboldt County teems with excellent, dependable, helpful, humane, responsive and responsible groups dedicated to helping pets and other animals. Here are some of them.

Mary, 97, can’t imagine life without Sam. “Sam is my best friend, the most loyal person ever to be in my life,” said Mary, who shares a suite at Timber Ridge Assisted Living in McKinleyville with her 13-year-old Golden Retriever, Samson. “I feel so safe with him at the foot of my bed at night.

My mom was in her 80s, still riding her horse on lumber company roads behind McKinleyville with her friend Carol Stewart, accompanied, as always, by her pack of hounds. That is, one actual hound and two small dogs who thought they were hounds. Their job was to sweep the trails for dangerous wildlife like moun...