I’m the crazy cat lady they warned you about! Just kidding. I don’t hoard hordes of cats, just 2 sets of bonded pairs and 1 sweet black cat I’ve been keeping for a friend… for 7 years now.
My first cat was a stray my family was sure was a female, but “she” turned out to be a neutered male with seemingly feminine traits.
Thus began my lifelong pattern of rescuing the weirdest cats.
Over the years I developed a pattern of always having 3 cats at any given time (the legal limit in most cities), but it never seemed to work out that well.
When I had 2 males and 1 female, the boys dominated the house to the point that the girl had to be rehomed. I found her a nice country home with my relatives.
One of these males was an orange tabby stray that my ex had fallen wildly in love with after witnessing his extremely close call being clipped by an 18-wheeler on our busy street. We were managing an apartment complex at the time, and “Red” became the complex’s “mascat.” I insisted that we get Red neutered before adopting him, which my ex was against. But he loved what I wrote in our newsletter: “Red’s reason for crossing the road has now been surgically removed.”
A decade later, on New Year’s Day in 2000, I was visiting my brother, then living in a cabin on a river up in the mountains. His female cat had given birth the previous July to 2 kittens that were mostly feral and living outside, shunning all attempts to pet them. Seeing them in the snow, I convinced him to let me take them home if possible. It wasn’t easy capturing the brother but once we did, his sister came along willingly.
At this point I already had 2 cats at home, so I knew I could keep only one of these kittens (per the 3-cat city limit). The male, an orange tabby, was slated to be adopted by my ex, who was remarried by then. He wanted to name him Red after our former cat. But he was adamantly against having Red #2 neutered, claiming it had ruined Red #1’s personality and changed him into a docile lapcat. As Red #2 was nearly feral to begin with, and did not adapt well to becoming a city cat, this did not end well. He ran away from my ex, never to be seen again.
Perhaps if he’d adopted Red #2’s sister too, as I had implored him, things would have turned out better.
Red #2’s sister was now all by herself, but not for long, as my male kitty became her surrogate brother. Soon they were inseparable. But it took a full 2 months to get her to let me pet or hold her. She would always hang back out of reach, intensely distrustful of humans. This was why I wasn’t able to take her to be spayed after it turned out she had been impregnated by Red #2. When I finally was able to get her into the vet’s exam room, he agreed that she was far too small and malnourished to become a mother at only 6 months herself, and to save her life, the pregnancy had to end.
For her first 2 months with me, this sweet little girl kitty would sit 15 feet away, mewing the most pitiful little cry. Yet she would run away if I moved toward her. It was time to act.
I had seen a program on TV about the mother of an autistic human child enveloping him in her arms during tantrums as part of an intense therapy experiment, so I decided to try that with my extremely skittish kitty. Sure enough, that was what finally did the trick with this feral girl. I would hold her tightly for just a few minutes at a time, murmuring “Let Mama hold you” over and over. Gradually we worked our way up to longer sessions until she turned into a sweet, affectionate cat. She even warmed up to a few of the men in my life, though she remained shy and skittish her entire life.
To Be Continued…