After some fiddling around, I got it set up. I also managed to set it up so people can sort of have pets. They can name it by putting it's name in the custom user title field (which I moved just under the pet image). I changed "flag" to read "pet". You cannot care for the pet, but at least you can display it and name it.
Considering that I know pretty much know no PHP (other than what I muck around with on the forum...usually giving me a parse error for the first 10+ tries until I finally get it right LOL), I am pretty proud of myself!