{"id":56586,"date":"2026-09-29T06:06:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T10:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56586"},"modified":"2026-09-29T06:06:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T10:06:31","slug":"one-for-the-animal-lovers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56586","title":{"rendered":"One for the Animal lovers"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Raffique Shah
\nSeptember 19, 2026<\/em> <\/p>\n

Raffique Shah<\/a>As a young fella, I had several animals. I was never really a cat person, but dogs, I loved and took care of.<\/p>\n

At one point the people in my village, Beaucarro, used to call me Brown Boy, after my pet dog which attempted to accompany me wherever I went. They would often hear me shouting after him: Brown Boy, go home! We had just moved from Freeport junction to Beaucarro which was about a mile away, and Brown Boy had not yet settled into his new surroundings. Whenever I would head out to school on mornings, Brown Boy saw it as his duty to accompany and protect me on my way there. On one such morning, as I left for school with him in tow, I remember going back home and taking him with me and tying him, because school was three miles away and at that very young age, I didn\u2019t want him to become stranded or disoriented.
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\nOver the years I would go on to own more dogs and even a cow named Darling. Darling birthed about four calves in her time, each time giving us no more than four bottles of milk. She was not the obvious choice for a pet, she was meant for work purposes, but she was treated better than any other farm animal back then. And, in my later years in Beaucarro, I would look after goats and birds. My favourite though were always dogs. Their loyalty and their affection, not forgetting their alertness when protecting their owners. My father was the one who taught me how to care for dogs especially when they engaged other neighbourhood dogs in fights resulting in wounds. Vets were not widely available and whenever they were, that was not a cost a poor family like mine could have afforded.<\/p>\n

When I married my wife, Rosina, and I moved to Claxton Bay, I would have several dogs here as well. One of the most intriguing was my dog, Bjorn Dog, named after Swedish tennis player Bjorn Borg. He was an intelligent common dog, and he was the baddest on the block. Today, if he had been around, I might have been battling several lawsuits all resulting from his ferocity. However, I pride myself on being a responsible pet owner, so the likelihood of that happening would have been very slim.<\/p>\n

Then my son got another dog, said to have been mixed with German Shepherd. We named him Torlok. He was the precise opposite of Bjorn Dog. He ran to us for protection whenever he saw strangers approaching. By then things had changed for us. My daughter and my wife were empaths, and they insisted on the best care my journalist salary could afford for all pets going forward. The first of which was a small-breed, Lhasa Apso, named Shadow. He started off being kept in our toilet, and my wife\u2019s fears of him being dog-napped while we slept made us move him inside the house. Shadow went on to live for about ten years and of all our dogs, he lived ten of the best years.<\/p>\n

If you have ever owned a Lhasa, you know they draw attention wherever they go. People are in absolute awe of their beauty and their long fur. He was the star of the show back then. After I drove my two adult children to the vet\u2019s office to say goodbye to him\u2014he was ill and had to be euthanised\u2014they vowed: no more pets. My advice at the time was: when you learn to love something, you have to know that one day you will be hurt by its passing.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2020 when my daughter decided to adopt two stray cats that ended up on our doorstep. Two would turn into five in quick order. I am not a cat person and in spite of my entreaties to keep us clear of any animals living indoors with us, not to mention the fact that I am asthmatic, those all fell on deaf ears. So now I am the owner of five spayed and neutered cats.<\/p>\n

One day soon, it will most likely be four, because the main attraction at the house, a 25-pounder named Groucho, is unfortunately on his last. I never had a liking for the fella, but everyone else did. Relatives, friends, strangers, even foreigners, they all love the guy. It pains me to see how gutted my daughter is over his illness, and the fact that we may not be able to save him.<\/p>\n

In this life, you love your brother or your sister intensely; similarly, many people love their pets deeply. Further, losing any of them\u2014sibling, spouse, or pet\u2014will just carry varying degrees of the same kind of pain. The one that resonates from your chest, and never quite leaves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Raffique Shah September 19, 2026 As a young fella, I had several animals. I was never really a cat person, but dogs, I loved and took care of. At one point the people in my village, Beaucarro, used to call me Brown Boy, after my pet dog which attempted to accompany me wherever I … Continue reading One for the Animal lovers<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[169],"class_list":["post-56586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-tt","tag-raffique-shah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56587,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56586\/revisions\/56587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}