Category Archives: Cats

I just love them so much!

Life in the House of Six Quadrupeds

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Six quadrupeds! That’s 24 legs, folks. That’s a lot! Apparently some people missed the memo that we are keeping the foster kittens. I thought that was kind of obvious from the moment I called them “foster kittens,” because, yeah, right. But just to make it official, yes, we are now the legal owner of the little critters. We have…deep breath…four cats and two dogs. There, I said it.

Things have been a little chaotic since they came to live with us. We fell into a routine of shutting them in the spare bedroom overnight, so the senior dogs and cats could join us upstairs without fear of being body checked by a flying furball in the night. And so aforementioned furballs would not become a midnight protein supplement to somebody.

Then, in the morning, we would give all of the animals a little time to mingle, then banish the dogs downstairs. Senior cats Diamond and Simba have spent varying amounts of time “observing.” Well, they claim they are observing, taking notes, documenting–you know, all of the stuff you do when you realize that management has gone off the rails and you’re going to have to pass along the info to your lawyer.

Personally, I think those observations have at times been distinctly affectionate. True, there’s not a lot of mutual grooming going on–a few licks here and there from Diamond, and definitely no sleep-snuggling, but you can kind of see it coming. The kittens are undeterred in their interest in befriending the older cats, and Simba’s ringing swats on the head have not discouraged them. Neither has Diamond’s hot-and-cold, mixed-signals kind of behavior.

Today something new happened. We put the dogs downstairs and let the kittens out upstairs. Well, the kittens strutted right into the living room and made themselves at home. “We will sit on ur cowlches,” they declared. “We will play with your potted plantses!” They paid no mind to the dogs, and, for a wonder, the dogs were pretty much resigned to their presence, so there was minimal drama.

Courage, who is deathly afraid of kittens, got himself out of the way whenever he saw them coming, and looked to the nearest human for reassurance. Chewie followed them around with his patented worried expression, but everyone is tired of his crap by now. Even the kittens.

We no longer have a house divided. I knew it would happen sooner or later. Apparently the answer was sooner.

So we had all kinds of crazy pet mixing going on today, and it was fine. Life with four quadrupeds. Who would have thought?

In Which Dogs are Bad at Math

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Chewie continues to be fascinated by and worried about the kittens. They traveled with us this weekend, because they are too young yet to be trusted alone in the house with a huge pile of food like our other cats. They have a cage that they sleep in at night, when we bring the dogs upstairs. Otherwise, the dogs are banished from the second story, and the kittens have the run of it.

Last night, we put the kittens in their cage and invited Chewie upstairs, a ritual he looks forward to every night. He anxiously peered into the cage at the kittens. However, dogs don’t count well, so even though both kittens were in there, he was worried there might be some loose still. He wanted to check inside the kitty carrier to make sure.

Just has he was starting to be reassured that all two of the kittens were inside the cage, my stomach made a teeny tiny growling noise. Chewie swung his head around, looking for the kitten that was hiding somewhere in the room growling at him. He began checking all likely hiding spots like behind the door and inside the luggage–showing good understanding of kitten hiding behavior, but poor math skills.

Chewie is a smart dog, and I can see him beginning to grasp the concept of the kittens being locked in a cage. Dogs clearly understand when they themselves are locked in a room or a cage, but they seem uncertain about the inside/outside status of kittens locked in a cage.

Chewie’s thought process looks something like this:

There is a swingy thing on the front of the cage that keeps me from sticking my head in there and smelling the kitties. Let’s call it WOOF.

When I can stick my head in the cage, WOOF equals zero. When I can’t stick my head in the cage, WOOF equals 1. What is the value of WOOF that allows the kittens to–HEY, they get to have Chicken flavored Pounce treats!?! That’s not fair!

And so it goes.

Foster Kitten Update

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Kittens are really hard to photograph! I’ve put off updating about the kittens until I could get a good picture of them. I wanted a picture of them sleeping in the foam pumpkin (funkin) that Glen carved for a halloween mask, but I never had my camera at the right time, and if you don’t get the picture within the first 11 nanoseconds that you find them looking cute, the opportunity is gone.

So I tried to pose them and got a series of blurred pictures of little kitten butts for my efforts. Glen finally grabbed them and held them semi-still for the photo above, and one of my candid snapshots turned out okay. The photo above makes them look much larger than they actually are. They are each about two handfuls worth right now.

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These previously feral kittens have drunk the housecat kool-aid and are now completely tame. In fact, we may have overdone it, creating a couple of aggressively affectionate kitties that will make nuisances of themselves climbing on and rubbing their owners, staring at them while they sleep, etc. Sorry about that!

Athena was a bit slower to come around than Titus, but then again she is clearly the “smart one.” Gotta wonder about Titus’s survival skills, as he was pretty trusting and willing to be handled straight out of the wild. Good thing we rescued him!

The kittens have no fear of the dogs, although they probably should. Chewie continues to be obsessed with them, and we are working with him in short sessions to teach him appropriate behavior. I think his intentions are good, as he’s had Athena all the way in his mouth several times and only left her wet, but we’re still supervising closely. I would like it if Chewie could relax in the kittens’ presence and maybe not stare at them so hard he’s quivering.

Courage is flatly afraid of the kittens. I tested him by letting them loose in the master bedroom while Courage was on the bed. He sensibly began crying and squirming away from whatever direction he saw a kitten. From a cat’s perspective, that is a well-trained dog. The good news is that the kittens don’t seem to be triggering his predatory instincts, which apparently he saves for moles and such.

Simba and Diamond still resolutely avoid the little interlopers, although yesterday Diamond did make a special trip up to the bathroom to find them, hiss at them, and run away, so that’s progress!

We had some excitement yesterday as we heard a large crashing noise coming from upstairs, followed by terrified cat yowling noises. My sister and I tripped over each other trying to get there to see what happened. By the time she, Brent, and I got upstairs, the kittens had disappeared. The source of the noise was an old bunk bed we had disassembled and left in pieces leaning against the wall. We couldn’t find the kittens anywhere. We finally located Athena under the bed, but Titus was missing a long time, and we were all pretty nervous that he was badly injured. I finally looked one more time at the scene of the accident, and realized it was at the top of the stairs. The baby gate was at the bottom of the stairs, so it occurred to me he could have scampered downstairs and hid in the coat closet. And that’s where I found him! Both kitties were fine. Nine lives!

They’re growing fast and I think they’ll officially be ready for adoption early next week. My resolve to pack them off to an adoptive home is weakening, however. They are so cute, and they’ve got us through a tough time, and we do have space. None of my friends have four cats, so that means I would be WINNING at cats, right? The thing is, if we keep these guys, that would pretty much be the end of my kitten fostering career. There’s no way my husband would let me bring home a passle of bottle babies or another set of feral kittens to be tamed, as I will have proved I can’t give them up. Sigh.

Ok, so now would be the time for someone to tell me that they’ve been looking for two really cute, sweet kittens to adopt. Anyone?

Leaving Cats at Home

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I would say that RV traveling with the dogs was a success. However, what to do with the cats was more of a problem. Some people take their cats RVing with them, but those cats are probably not indoor/outdoor cats who are expert escape artists and prone to explosive vomiting and diarrhea when they travel in cars.

In the past, we have done well just leaving the cats at home with a neighbor to look in on them, but we knew we’d be away for at least three weeks, so that didn’t seem like a good idea, either. I looked at kenneling them. It would have been more than $30 per day for both cats. I love my cats, but that’s a lot of money. I finally decided to hire a pet sitter.

The pet sitter talked us into hiring her to come every other day rather than three times a week as I’d proposed. She had a good point that when cats get sick, they can crash rapidly, and often do not recover well. I had a terrible experience in childhood when one of our family cats went missing for three or four days. She must have been locked in a garage or something, because she came back severely dehydrated. Even though we took her to the vet immediately, she didn’t make it. Cats can get dead in a hurry when they feel like it, nine lives notwithstanding.

So I booked the petsitter, who did a fine job, as far as that goes. The problem is the cats didn’t really cooperate. I assured the pet sitter that both cats would be lonely, and would volunteer themselves for petting and feeding when she arrived.

What actually happened is that one cat disappeared somewhere in the house, not to be seen by human eyes for the ENTIRE trip, and the other cat moved out and became feral.

If you know my cats, you can guess which cat did which. Diamond became invisible cat, detectable only by disappearing food and occasional leavings in the litter box.

Simba used the cat door to try to find himself a new family. I got a couple of calls on the road from the family he was trying to adopt. They helpfully escorted him home, but he persisted in hanging around their yard and hunting their rodents. They didn’t feed him, because they didn’t want to encourage him, so he lost a lot of weight.

Having communicated with the pet sitter we knew that Diamond was missing and could not be confirmed to be safe or well, so we were relieved when she materialized instantaneously upon or arrival. She literally jumped onto the hood of our car as if she’d been waiting by the driveway the whole time. We have no idea why she went into ninja cat mode while we were gone. She’s actually quite social.

Simba! I had to call the neighbor and get directions to his house and fetch Simba home. He came home, ate probably a whole pound of cat food, and then disappeared again. I had to go back the next day and bring him home again before it stuck.

Simba’s prospective family adored him. Apparently he’s been visiting for quite some time. They had given him a name and regaled me with many stories of the amusing things he would do. On the phone, I had asked if he had jumped on their shoulders yet. Later, the man was very excited to tell me that Simba had jumped on his shoulders for the first time. The discussion of what an intelligent, friendly, unique, entertaining cat Simba was just went on and on. Simba was not the least bit embarrassed by it. All of the world is full of his admirers. As it should be.

I’m not sure what we’ll do about the cats if we go on another long trip. I’m actually kind of stumped. $30/day is a lot to add to the cost of a trip for cat security. But I think our absence ended up being traumatic for both of them.