Professional Yeller, Stink Bug Connoisseur, Foster Failure
(September 24, 2014 – June 22, 2026)
Sallie came into our lives as a foster at four months old, and she made sure that arrangement didn’t last — we failed spectacularly, and happily, at letting her go.
Sallie lived life loudly and on her own terms. She demanded attention from everyone she met and even from those in cars next to us at stoplights, a running commentary she delivered in what we lovingly called her “wookie warble” — a sound so close to Chewbacca that you half expected her to demand the Millennium Falcon. She despised baths but never met a patch of filthy creek water she didn’t want to wade straight into. Sticks and leaves floating down the creek were treated as personal threats and barked at accordingly.
Her palate was equally particular: she loved hot tamales, and ate stink bugs with grim determination, even though her face always suggested she regretted it the moment she did.
She had a gentler side too. Every foster kitten that came through got the full Sallie treatment — relentless whining devotion. Sallie was, against all evidence of her warble, a softie. Even deer in the backyard were treated as neighborly “big dogs” and asked to play. With Herbert, her partner in crime, she’d put on ferocious-sounding wrestling matches that, on closer inspection, were mostly were just two dogs mouthing at the air a respectful two inches apart while making the most of it sound-wise.
She is survived by her family, her kitties, Herbert, all who will greatly miss her,
and by a stink bug population that can finally relax.