Rosco and Lolli

This is a story about the two most unlikely of friends. Please bear with me as a little background and character development is needed. As some of you know, We live out in the country and we have a lot of animals. Specifically, 2 horses, 22 cows, 2 guinea, 7 cats, and 4 dogs. Three of the dogs live inside with us and lately we have added one of the cats to our indoor pets. This is about one of our dogs and our indoor cat. Rosco and Lolli. Rosco is a chocolate lab and lolli is a black and white 3 legged house cat.
We have always had several pets, but after our retired police dog "Shana" passed we were slowly getting out of the pet business. We only had the 2 horses and one dog "Sassy". There is a back story to how we got all of our pets and someday I will bore you with how we got back full time into our pets. I was very sad about Shana and I did not want any more pets. However, God had some different plans for me.
One day I was out doing hill repeats on my trusty cannondale (not a fun thing to do at all), and I noticed a funny squeaking noise coming from my bike on the descents. After about the third repeat I figured out that the noise wasn't my bike at all it was some type of animal that was very close to the road. Apparently, as I was huffing and puffing up the hill I was drawing attention to myself by some sort of critter! The more hill repeats I did I become more intrigued with what and where this noise was coming from.
When I finished my last repeat I had determined that someone had trapped a coyote and it was suffering badly. I had nothing to deal with this situation on my bike so I rode home. I told my son Jason about it and instructed him to take a gun and if it was a trapped coyote deal with the situation appropriately. I do not like such endeavors, but we have a lot of coyotes where we live and they can be a problem. I generally do not care for taking something else's life, but if it was a suffering wild animal it was the only thing to do. Jason and I have had to face several of these situations before. I took my shower and waited on Jason to return with a description of the events. When I saw his face I know something was wrong. He told me and Toni to look on the porch. There was a small chocolate labrador puppy. I was not a happy camper. I did not want another pet, but Toni had been bitten by the puppy bug, and a labrador puppy at that.
Cutest damn bug to be bitten by in my estimation. Jason said that the reason the puppy was making so much noise was that someone had wrapped him in barbed wire and put him on a fire ant hill. Yup, you read that right, there are some seriously messed up individuals in this world, and in this seventh circle of hell that we live in called West Georgia there are some real winners! This is how Rosco came into our lives. Rosco is the happiest dog in the world he brightens every day. He is now a part of our family.

He was this small for about 2 weeks

The story of Lolli is equally sad and happy. You know how cats love to get under the hoods of cars. Yep, thats right. One of our cats had a litter of kittens and she chose to keep them very close to where we park our cars. I suspected that a kitten would eventually find it's way under a tire or on a motor one day, so I was especially careful because I knew that would be hard to explain to Toni or a big vet bill or both. I had a ritual of tapping all of the tires with a stick and honking the horn etc.. All to no avail. One bright and sunny day, after the ritual, I hop into my Cadillac and proceed to back out ever so slowly. One inch at a time until I hear that unmistakable shriek from a kitten stuck where it was not supposed to be. Toni happened to be outside at the time, and she heard it too. I stopped immediately, but the shrieking did not. I inched forward for fear that that kitten was under a tire. It wasn't. The kitten was sitting inside the wheel and it got caught up in the brakes somehow. Toni saw the kitten run out, so we assumed all was well. We were wrong. We found him with his brothers and sisters and everything looked fine.

UNTIL .... the next morning when Toni went to feed the cats. She noticed one with a really screwed up paw. Somehow this kitten had managed to get his paw stuck in the brake caliper and it was mangled beyond all repair. I proceeded to chop off his leg with an axe...... Just kidding. We took him to the vet and they said we had two choices, put him down or amputate his leg. That was not even a choice to be made. Since a three legged cat wouldn't stand much of a chance out here, we knew that he was about to become an inside cat for somebody. That somebody was us.
If you have seen the YouTube video of Rosco and Lolli (part 1) you know how he got his name Lolli. If not you should check it out. You see, for some reason, Rosco had a very strange association with Lolli. They are the best of friends. From day one of bringing Lolli back home from the vet, Rosco has had nothing for him but love. He licks him and cleans him as if he were his mother. He licks him so much we said that he was Rosco's lollipop. Thus the very un-masculine name of Lolli stuck with this cat.