Page 37 2026 Animal Stories Lincoln Daily News February 2026 Moo has always been very loving to our family. She loves to lay on our laps, taking any opportunity to do so. When one of us is upset, she always comes around to check on us and curl up in our lap. She will also still climb on our shoulders to this day. The story of how we got Angus actually begins with Moo. We had to leave Moo home alone while Abby and I volunteered at a camp one summer. We were only about ten minutes from our apartment, but the organizers wanted us to sleep at the camp to help keep an eye on the kids since they were also staying there. We would go home a couple of times a day to feed Moo, pet her for a few minutes, and clean her cat box, but then we had to get back. After the second night, we noticed that Moo’s eye was starting to look really bad, seemingly out of nowhere. She has always had an issue with one of her eyes (the vet tells us that one eye is smaller than the other), so we got really worried. We ended up taking her to an emergency vet late at night. The vet did some tests and told us it was pink eye. When we asked how she could have contracted it, the vet told us that, since we have been gone a lot recently, she may have been nervously scratching at her face. In doing so, she may have scratched her eye with a dirty claw and caused an infection. We got medicine to give her and took her home, but we realized that she was going to need a friend. The next few weeks, we went back to the APL looking for a boy cat. There was really only one option, but they were a bonded sibling pair, and we did not want two more cats. We really did not want to break up the pair either, and were informed that there were some kittens at the Petsmart on Veterans Parkway. We went there and found a little black cat named Bumblebee. My wife has a soft spot for creatures that are not always loved by most people. Knowing the stigma around black cats, she wanted to adopt him and take him home. We got the paperwork in order and were told they were going to neuter him, and that we could come pick him up in the next couple of days. For those days, we were discussing all kinds of names, as we had not yet settled on the name Angus. I remember we were driving, Abby was looking up names on her phone, and stumbled across the name Angus. Considering Moo was clearly named after a Holstein cow, and Angus was all black like an Aberdeen Angus cow, we knew we needed to choose that name. Just like that, the Boutcher CATtle ranch was born. Angus
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