A self-taught cow herder, a member of the home team: Meet CDT’s cutest pet winners
Two four-legged fellows won the furriest elections in Pennsylvania: that for the Centre County’s cutest dog and cat.
Oakley, a collie from Coburn, won the dog competition with 34% of votes, while Jackie Robinson, a domestic medium hair from State College, won the cat competition with 46%.
Both winners will move onto national contests across McClatchy’s U.S. news markets.
Turnout was low, with more than 300 votes for the dogs and 59 for the cats.
Oakley
Oakley taught herself to herd the cows, according to owner Jessica Buck.
She wasn’t meant to be a farm dog, but when Buck brought her to her dairy farm, Oakley took to chasing cows from the pasture into the barn.
“She gets all excited and her tail goes because she’s so proud of herself,” Buck said.
Oakley, originally Missy, came into Buck’s life more than a year after she lost the first dog she owned as an adult, another collie named Sterling, to Lyme disease. It took more than a year for her to decide on a new dog.
“It was Easter Sunday, and we were waiting to go to my parents for dinner,” she said. “I must have just felt ready or something came over me, and I started looking at blue merle collies online, and Oakley popped up.”
And so Buck drove hours to Sugar Creek, Ohio to pick up Oakley, learning only when she met her that the dog had one blue eye and one brown.
“She’s just amazing and filled a hole in my heart that I didn’t think could be replaced,” Buck said.
Jackie Robinson
Kerry Kaylegian, an emeritus Penn State dairy professor, speaks about Jackie Robinson in baseball terms.
Jackie doesn’t have littermates, he has teammates. Kaylegian, a years-long foster mom for the Centre County PAWS animal shelter, traded a one cat for a mother and her four kittens, Jackie among them.
Kaylegian said that when she arrived at PAWS, a volunteer said she needed to name the foster kittens.
“And she said, ‘Do you like baseball?’” said Kaylegian, a fan of the Cubs, Brewers and Pirates who rooted for the Blue Jays in the World Series.
So the kittens were named Jackie, Babe Ruth (later renamed Willie Mays as Babe was a “crappy cat name”), Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle. Hank, Mickey and the mother, she said, needed to be traded to “other teams,” but she adopted Jackie and Willie for the “home team.”
Despite being named for a legendary athlete, Jackie’s “gotten a little on the chubby side,” according to Kaylegian. The box in which Jackie was photographed for this contest has become a snack for the cat.
“He’s taking the off season a little too seriously,” she said.
