At home with the herd. Part I and Part II
(the tale of 1 thru 6)
Last night my wife and I hosted a little picnic for most of the staff of the Best Little Cat House in PA. During the evening I was asked to relate the story of how we came to have a herd of 11 wildebeest in the house. After a few drinks I was more inclined to elaborate on the details of each and every new addition to herd. I decided that the story might be of interest to a larger audience.
In the summer of 2002 we had 2 elderly cats Maggie 17 and Chessie 18 years old and when the Chessie died we thought that Maggie was a little lonely. At the time I had been feeding 2 kittens in the backyard. When it started to get colder I put a box under the deck for them to shelter in. We thought the black and white one belonged to one of our neighbors but the brown fluffy one was really cute and one day my wife said "lets bring her inside". I want to go on record here that it was all her idea OK. So being the resourceful person that I am, I devised a method of capturing these teenage kittens. I started leaving the sunroom door open and feeding them inside. When they got used to this I let the door close behind one of them and the black and white one was caught. She was checked out, found NOT to belong to our neighbor as we had thought so we had ourselves a new house kitty. When she was picked up she would squeak and break wind. She was named Squeaky the Flatulent or Squeak for short.
Squeak the Flatulent
The little fluffy brown one was more of a problem. On a particularly cold frosty Thanksgiving morning I put food out for her on the deck and out of her box she came trilling with pleasure at the food. I went out for a few minutes and when I came back she was inside! My wife Kelly had her in her arms. She had opened a ground floor window and fluffy brown one had walked in, walked out, walked in again and decided to stay! She again was checked out and we named her Amber Shadow because of her colouring and her talent of disappearing at will.
Amber Shadow
Some time during the next year our lovely Maggie died and we were down to 2 again. In late September we were preparing for a trip to England when I noticed a scrawny little kitty going to sleep under a tree. I went out the back door and Kelly went out the front door to try and catch her. By the time I got around the front of the house she was sitting on the front porch on Kelly's lap! She was very thin and we left her in the care of a friend from work who carried her around in her arms all the time we were away! She was a little calico and she was named Pumpkin.
Pumpkin
The next summer a colleague at work who does not "do" animals gave me a kitten. She liked to curl up in a plant pot so we named her Lily! Lily is a bit of a slug so her nickname is Jabba the Hutt.
Lily
The next addition to the herd came by choice, a chance visit to another Cat House volunteers house led me to fall for a little black kitten who we named Katy or Katybug or even Katy the snot monster. I must admit I did kind of twist Kelly's arm a little on this one, but Katybug is well worth the 10 years of servitude that I had to promise Kelly to get her! Katy has a bit of a problem in that one of her nasal passages is not very large and she can project a string of snot for several feet. When she starts to build up a head of steam to eject the snot we both dive for the kleenex, well Kelly does, I dive for the nearest cover.
Katybug
A chance visit to the farm opposite on a late Sunday afternoon led to a set of circumstances which I shall never forget. The farmers daughter asked me what was wrong with this little ginger kitten. He had a huge bulge on his abdomen. A quick call and visit to Lynn and he was in good hands. She took him the next day to the vets and after a 3 hour surgery to repair a double hernia it was going to be doubtful that he would survive. He recovered thanks to the care he received and was later adopted out for a few weeks but this fell through. He came to live with us on a temporary basis while we found him a home. This nice lady had just lost her elderly cat and wanted to adopt him. She was on her way to the house to pick him up when someone, not me I might add couldn't let him go. So I had to apologize to the nice lady and tell her we were keeping him. He had already had several names but Kelly called him Dylan or Dylan Bastard as we affectionately call him.
Dylan Bastard
Part II
(the tale of7 thru 14)
To start part II of this little cat tale I would like to quote my wife Kelly. "I never wanted cats, I wanted fish. I like fish, no trouble fish, sprinkle a bit of food in the tank and that's it." So there we were with 6 cats. I'm food person to the cats, I feed them and cleanup front end problems, puke and hairballs are my responsibility. Kelly is sh1t person, she deals with the litter boxes, I still get to carry the 40lb kitty litter bags from the car to the basement and I also get to take out the used litter every Wednesday into the trash bin. Our cats defy the laws of physics, a 40lb bag of kitty litter plus 10 lb of food make 100lbs of stinky litter every week! Anyway I digress. We had trapped spayed and neutered several cats that frequented our country backyard. There was Whiner and Not Whiner, Not Whiner was the twin brother of Whiner, they looked identical except that Whiner was very noisy he used to make this whining noise when he wanted attention or food whereas Not Whiner was much more timid and silent. We managed to get Whiner adopted, he was real easy, such a super cat. Not Whiner renamed Billy teamed up with 3 other youngsters, Badger, VB and Fang, they made the yard their own. We caught them and had them neutered and Fang the only female of the bunch was spayed. Badger was named for his black and white coloring, VB (Vicious Beast) because he hissed and growled all the time we had him caged before and after his procedure and Fang because she bit me when I got a little careless when I trapped her. I only had to spend 3 hours at the local hospital when my hand got infected but even so the name Fang stuck. They all proved to be negative for FIV and FeLV so we released them back into the yard. I placed two igloos under my upper deck and got heaters to keep them toasty during the winter. Every morning I would open the ground floor window and out of the igloos they would come stretching and yawning. Life was good for them, it was a real treat to see them playing together in the yard chasing the squirrels. Billy injured his front leg somehow and so I caught him again and took him to the vets. We kept him in the sunroom in a large pen and allowed the others to visit him by propping the outside door open, the other 3 would come in and rub noses and keep him company for a while, along with the occasional Possum! We decided to bring them inside and they became the sunroom kitties. We had them all tested again and then integrated them in with the rest of the herd. That made 10. Badger I can pick up, VB I can stroke when there's food involved, Billy is coming around but I cant get near Fang. To see them curled up together on a single chair is wonderful, don't let the fact that a cat is feral or semi feral stop you giving them a home, it is not a problem and you can get them to trust you with patience.
Billy
Badger
VB
Fang
Around the time that we brought them inside a white male with a black tail appeared in the yard. We named him WWBT obviously, (White With Black Tail), we caught him and took him to the vets, turned out he had already been neutered, he too was neg/neg so we released him. A while later I noticed a graze on his head which I treated easily because he was becoming quite tame. It healed up and the hair grew back but he did it again, don't know what he did but it was in a similar place to the previous time. This time it was infected so off to the vets we took him, he was given a course of antibiotics so into the sunroom he went. While we were treating him with the intention of releasing him we discovered that he had been declawed on his front paws! There was no way we were going to release him after this so he became #11 He was renamed Albert and is a total lapcat.
Albert
The next batch were all kittens, the first one we caught (opened the window and picked her up) was Monster, she was lovely black little long haired kitten, We kept her in the bedroom where she preferred living under the bed and as everyone knows that's where the monsters live so she was named Monster. We were convinced that a friend of ours would want to adopt her after she house sat for a week. No such luck so she was renamed Misha and became #12.
Misha
That left 2 regular visitors to the back yard to trap. Being busy most of September and early October meant I did not attempt to catch them, they were still fed daily and I was able to pick them up quite easily. They appeared to be siblings though quite different in size. One Saturday in early November I was working outside clearing leaves and happened to look down on the larger of the 2 and to my horror saw she was pregnant. Talk about panic! I was phoning around trying to get her in as quickly as possible. She was neg/neg and came through the operation very well. I kept her in the sunroom as it was below freezing outside and she needed to be kept warm for at least 6 weeks for her hair to grown back, otherwise she would not have survived, she would not had been able to keep warm due to lack of hair on her belly. I caught her sister and again being neg/neg she joined her sister in the sunroom. Somehow they joined the main herd (don't ask me how) the largest was renamed Lucy and the smallest we named Sasha. It is rare that we see more than 7 at a time and that's usually when I have a roaring coal fire going and they are crowded around the hearth roasting, other than that it's just in the morning when they all seem to be jumping on me telling me to get up and feed them. They haven't discovered where I keep the baseball bat yet.
Lucy
Sasha
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