Meet the winners of the Miami Herald’s Cutest Pet Contest. ‘They are family.’
Meet Valentina and Gato.
Valentina, a shih tzu, and Gato, an exotic short hair, were the clear winners of the Miami Herald’s first Cutest Pet Contest.
Valentina got 1,963 votes, or 33%, among the entered dogs.
Gato, with the Portuguese pronunciation, “Gah-too,” pulled in 702 votes or 48%, among the cats.
Readers in South Florida submitted photos and brief descriptions of their furry family members, and two rounds of voting determined the winners.
The contest was just for fun, and not a scientific survey. So anyone who wants to still claim they have the cutest cat or dog in South Florida can still enjoy that self-proclaimed status.
But Valentina and Gato? They certainly have the cuteness gene.
The humans who have bragging rights as owners of the winning pets in this contest are married couples without children. Well, maybe that’s not quite accurate. We pet owners know our dogs and cats are family, our children.
Valentina, with her sibling Hamilton, a Maltese who finished fourth in the competition, lives with Luz and Angel Martinez at their Cutler Bay home.
Gato makes her home in Miami Beach with Eric and Luciana Marshall.
“We’ve been married 7 1/2 years. He’s our child,” says Eric Marshall of Gato.
“They are part of the family. That love grows,” said Luz Martinez of Valentina and Hamilton, who all share a Cutler Bay home.
Let’s meet our winning dog and cat.
Miami Herald’s Cutest Dog
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Luz Martinez chuckles when she remembers how Valentina joined her family eight years ago. She had never owned a dog. Just a pet rabbit once.
“I had been wanting a dog for a while to the point that whenever I would say that I wanted a dog, Angel always told me, “OK. Well, get a leash. Walk around the neighborhood at six o’clock in the morning. And when you do that for, like, a few months, and you still want a dog, let me know. He definitely was not on board for it. But I was back home in Los Angeles visiting family, and he just sent me a photo and said, ‘This is ours. Gonna get her in a week.’ And so I was thrilled.”
Martinez, 46, a mental health therapist with an office near Coconut Grove, started studying.
“I was watching all the YouTube videos. Buying all the books. Doing all the things, because I didn’t know what to expect. There definitely was an adjustment period. You think you know what to do, but you don’t,” she said in a phone interview with the Miami Herald.
Valentina was born in Dallas. A family member knew someone whose dog had three puppies. Valentina was driven from Dallas to Destin. The Martinezes drove up from Miami to welcome their new baby to the family. Valentina has since become a true traveler. She loves road trips.
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“She does love to travel throughout Florida,” Martinez said. “She’s been to Key West. She’s been to St Augustine. To Naples. To Jupiter. And, of course, to Destin, because we had to pick her up there.”
Luz Martinez’s patients have come to know Valentina’s charms. She’s become a bit of a therapist herself.
“I’ve been able to take her to the office, because she loves people,” Martinez said.
“She loves to, like, flip on her back to get her belly rubs. She will do this with all of my clients.”
So does Martinez find Valentina therapeutic, too?
“Oh my God, I do. I absolutely do. She’s so therapeutic for me. So I can be therapeutic for my clients.”
Hamilton is another beneficiary of Valentina’s good-natured ways, and when Dog Mom works from home on Mondays, Valentina sits next to her chair, as usual, and Hamilton is in on the calls, too. Valentina may prefer people but the two dogs bonded well.
“He got in the habit of wanting to be picked up as well. So he’s on my lap because of her,” Martinez said. “And this is how I work with my clients.”
Miami Herald’s Cutest Cat
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Eric Marshall, a Miami Beach attorney and Nautilus Middle School science and life lessons teacher and the school’s swim coach, can tell you the exact date his wife adopted her cat Gato from a mall in São Paulo, Brazil, and the cat’s birthday: March 13, 2011. He can recall the day he met his wife on April 19, 2015, and two days later on the 21st, when he met Gato. And, of course, he remembers his wedding anniversary of Feb. 17, 2018.
“We celebrate all,” Marshall, 54, said in a phone interview with the Miami Herald after he learned Gato clawed past the competition.
He also knows the number of photos of Gato in their photo album: 502. That’s because for years, Marshall would take and send her pictures of her “boys.”
“The boys miss you,” he’d message his wife. “I always take a selfie with him.”
That’s how close the trio have become over the years.
Luciana named the cat Gato, the Spanish word for cat, keeping things simple because she wasn’t sure she would keep him, her husband said. “And I’m not really a pet person, but this cat — he’s so adorable that he has transformed me.”
Gato initially favored Luciana. They’d had a four-year head start.
“We were getting married in 2018 and we spent a couple extra weeks together, Gato and I,” Marshall said. “And finally he just came up to the bed and laid down next to me and said, ‘Alright, rub me. It’s just you. Start taking care of me.’ And that was seven-plus years ago. And now I think he loves us both equally. It’s so neat. He cuddles like crazy. My wife loves to sleep with a pillow over her head. He likes to sleep just like his mom with his head covered with a pillow.”
Sometimes, Gato opts for his dad’s folded hand to the pillow.
“If I cuddle his head, he just curls up right into a ball right next to me. ... I love this little guy. He’s so adorable.”
Runner-up pets
Gato and Valentina may be the No. 1 cat and dog, but others made a run for the cutest pet. Here are the others in the Top 5 based on your votes:
Dogs
- No. 2: Koda. 1,117 votes, 18%.
- No. 3: Amadeus. 1,117 votes, 18%.
- No. 4: Hamilton. 587 votes, 10%.
- No. 5: Tank. 435 votes, 7%.
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Cats
- No. 2: Humphrey. 163 votes, 11%.
- No. 3: Autumn aka Aki. 140 votes, 10%.
- No. 4: Miso. 71 votes, 5%.
- No. 5: Boo Boo. 46 votes, 3%.
