Category: Cats

Today is the one-week mark since we brought Sooty to our house. The first few days were worrisome because he was so incredibly emaciated and yet was not particularly interested in food. We have super fancy and healthy food on hand for our cats, but he was unimpressed in the extreme. I went and bought a different kind of canned food and he grudgingly ate a little of it, but wasted most of each can.

I contacted the shelter where he'd been kept and they said he liked the super cheap canned food. Alrighty then. I did get him some semi-premium dry food to keep in his bowl between canned food feedings, but I bowed to his junk food preferences and bought several 50-cent cans of grocery store food yesterday. Since his digestive system was clearly sluggish (aren't you proud of me for sparing you the details?), I also picked up some pumpkin-and-squash baby food to supplement his diet with a little fiber. Mixing the cheap canned food and the vegetable baby food together turned out to be just the ticket. He's eating with much more enthusiasm now.

My husband and I have been taking turns spending time with him so he isn't left alone quite so much. We both observed that he appears to have some discomfort when eating. That and the fact that his breath would knock a maggot off a gut wagon tells me that he probably needs some dental care. I looked in his mouth and saw that he is missing a considerable number of teeth, so the chances that he has rotten or infected teeth in there somewhere seem pretty high to me.

Fortunately, my veterinarian's office is reasonably priced when it comes to dental work, so I'm taking him in on Saturday, piggybacking with Toby's annual check-up, to have them take a look. I used the term "foster cat" a lot when I made the appointment in the hope that they may take pity on me and give me a discount. I'm happy to do whatever it takes to restore Sooty to good health, but I'd just as soon keep the expenses down considering that he's ultimately going to become someone else's cat.

Sooty has definitely filled out a bit since he arrived. For the first day or two, his spine felt like a row of empty spools of thread. Now he's much less noticeably bony, although he's still very, very lean. It's actually unhealthy to "fatten up" a starved cat too quickly, so we're pleased with the pace of his progress.

Once we get him to a point where a stiff breeze wouldn't knock him over, we'll see about introducing him to the other cats in our household. I know he's dreadfully lonely in the laundry room by himself, but it's hard to divide our time enough to really give him a good amount of attention. When I go down to visit him, the dog barks for me the whole time. When I come back up to hang out with Toby and our cats, I hear Sooty's meows echoing up through the floor registers.

This is why we're in no danger of ending up in true Crazy Cat People territory. As much as it's important to give animals a chance to live, it's just as important to provide happy lives for them. We're stretched a bit thin even with our own pets and can just barely accommodate one more, even temporarily.

I'm hoping we can get Sooty transformed into the healthiest version of himself and adopted into a family that will enjoy his happy, friendly personality through the rest of his days. Then everyone wins.

As you can probably tell by the number of pets in my household and from stories like our rescue and return of Max the Cat to his family, my husband and I have a big, squishy soft spot for cats. That said, we are clearly at (over) our comfortable limit for animals in our small house and yet…

We're fostering a cat again. It's a risk because he's not associated with a rescue group this time; he's just a really sweet cat whose time at an overcrowded shelter was almost up. A volunteer noticed his situation and shared a photo and story on Facebook and I couldn't turn away.

The shelter called him Sooty because he was found in a car engine at a dealership with some of his fur singed. He's about ten years old, neutered and declawed already, so he was probably someone's pet before his misadventure under the hood of a strange car delivered him who-knows-how-many miles away from home.

He ended up at that town's shelter, which is having known problems accommodating cats. His stray hold expired yesterday and that's an out-and-out death sentence. The woman who posted him pled, "Don't let him die due to bureaucratic crap!" and that's what struck me the most because I'm very aware of how the shelter system in our country consistently fails cats. She knew and I know that as a senior cat, this boy would be completely out of luck if someone didn't step up.

So I messaged my husband with the cat's photo and story and said I thought we should offer to foster him. His immediate reply: "Do it."

As we discussed it further, I said to my husband that I knew a one-off foster like this was the equivalent of trying to hold back the tide with a rake. Still, it's like that story "A Single Starfish." I know I can't save them all, but I can make a difference for this one.

Thanks to our experience with Max, we have a pretty cozy cat area set up in our laundry room. I picked Sooty up last night and installed him in his new place with food, water, toys and a litter box. He's very friendly and loves attention. Unfortunately, he is shockingly thin and doesn't seem very interested in food, so I suspect I'll have to get him some veterinary attention before we can start looking for a permanent home for him. He seems pretty active and bright-eyed and his water consumption and litterbox use look normal, so I'm hoping his problem is no worse than a bad tooth or something like that.

Assuming we can get him to put on some healthy weight, we'll find a home for him to live out his life with one of our friends or by taking him to adoption events in conjunction with local rescue groups.

No matter what happens, I think we made the right choice by giving him a chance. We all deserve that.

Over the weekend I posted a picture of Trillian to Facebook. She has a classic case of Angry Tortie Face, so she looks noticeably irritated in the photo even though she was actually feeling pretty lovey.

Thus, I decided that she needed her own meme. She doesn't have the full-on Grumpy Cat thing happening, but she does look fed up and cranky. Here are some of the thoughts I attributed to her:

Want to play along? You can generate your own text for Miss Angry Tortie Face at Meme Generator.

When I woke up on Wednesday morning, my husband told me that he and another night owl friend had been eating at our local 24-hour Steak and Shake the night before and encountered a friendly stray cat. It had come up to them while they were chatting in the parking lot and made itself at home on the hoods of their cars. It was so sweet and nice that they asked around at the restaurant and nearby motel and learned that it had been hanging around for quite a while, making friends and presumably scoring food from anyone willing to offer some.

So they brought it home.

"Did I do the right thing?" my husband asked me, worrying that he had stolen someone's cat.

The fact that it had been cruising fast food dumpsters at 3:00 a.m. was enough to convince us both that it was in need of some help.

I went down and met the cat and decided that his neutered status and the skinny physique under all that fur suggested that he probably belonged to someone, but had been lost for a while.

My schedule wouldn't allow for me to get him scanned for a microchip that night, but I made sure to set tonight aside for a trip to my vet for a scan. In the meantime, he chilled out in our basement away from the other cats, gratefully accepting food and water as offered and mostly just staying curled up on the blanket and pillow we provided.

After work today, I stuffed his rather unwilling self into a carrier and my husband and I took him to our vet's office. The scan immediately revealed that he did indeed have a microchip. It was harder to look up the number online than I anticipated, but the vet assistant and I figured out which company it was from and I called them.

They discovered right away that he had been reported missing on the first of the month and put me on hold to try to contact the owners. They couldn't reach anyone and left a couple of messages, but because the owners had kept their registration current, the company was able to give me the owner's name, phone numbers and home address.

Since we were driving around with the cat in a carrier anyway, it seemed reasonable to stop by their house, which was within about a mile of where my husband had found the cat.

The GPS led us to their door and we got out and knocked. I asked the woman who answered, "Do you have a lost cat?"

She peered into the carrier and exclaimed, "Max!" Her daughter came out and retrieved him from the carrier, taking him inside to resume the food and snuggles that his disappearance had interrupted.

It turned out that Max (short for Maximus Prime) had actually been missing for several months, but they couldn't find his microchip paperwork right away to make the report to the company. Somehow he had crossed several very busy streets and couldn't find his way back on his own. 

Luckily Max's natural charisma got the attention of a couple of cat lovers out for a late night meal and his microchip ensured that he made it back to his family. 

A couple things to note about microchips:

• You have to make sure you register them and keep your information updated.
• Some brands (including the kind Max had) charge a renewal fee to remain activated. Obviously, it's worth it.

Hooray for Max and his family! I'm very glad to have been a part of their happy reunion.

Last week, the universe decided that my bank balance was a tad too high and therefore decided to smite my cat, Velvet, with a gastrointestinal problem. She began vomiting A LOT and after I changed my sheets and put our comforter aside to take to the laundromat, I made an appointment with our vet for Saturday morning.

Because we don't really know how old Velvet is (the shelter guessed that she was seven or eight when we got her in 2007) and her symptoms possibly pointed to hyperthyroidism, I went ahead and had blood work done. They also gave her IV fluids and some anti-nausea medication and I brought her home with some nice, bland prescription food and instructions to give her over-the-counter Pepcid.

That helped for about a day, but she spent all night vomiting again on Sunday and she was looking really rough on Monday morning. After talking to the vet, who said that her blood work was pretty much perfect, I was planning on taking her back in late that day. Then I stopped by the house after lunch and couldn't find Velvet anywhere.

I went down to the basement and saw a puddle of blood-tinged vomit at the foot of the stairs. Dr. Jones was following me and he pointed me to her, crouched under the shelves in the very back of the basement, in the coldest possible location. I lay down on the filthy basement floor, dragged her out of her terrible hiding spot as gently as possible, and took her immediately to the vet.

This time they did X-rays to see if maybe she'd swallowed something that was irritating her stomach. That seemed really unlikely to me (if it had been Jones, on the other hand…) and sure enough, her stomach and intestines looked clear, even with a barium tracer.

This time, she got IV fluids along with a different anti-nausea medication. Also, the vet told me that the barium itself is actually therapeutic because it coats the stomach.

I brought her home and she slept for the rest of the day. I posted on Facebook that from now on I would be charging all visitors to my house a fee for petting the special cat who was now worth her weight in gold.

The good news is that she's better now. She lost some weight during her ordeal, but her appetite remained hearty throughout so I'm sure she'll pick it back up now that she's stopped throwing up. Today she's been coming to me for attention, sitting on my lap and purring. Once I see her playing again, I'll know she's completely well.

So yes, that vet bill money would have been nice to keep around for something else, but I'm just glad my kitty isn't miserable anymore. That's completely worth the expense.

I was leaving work on Wednesday preparing to head to my dad's house to help out with a party he was hosting when the operations manager for our building approached me to ask for advice. For the second time this year, she'd found kittens under the lift at our loading dock and because she knew I volunteer for an animal rescue group, she figured I could help out.

I had a weak moment—I agreed to catch them and take them home with me.

I followed her back to the dock, pausing to get a deep cardboard box to put them in. When she raised the lift, there were two little faces staring out from the pit below. I got on my belly, reached down, and grabbed one in each hand. Sadly, there was a third kitten that had been killed by the lift mechanism.

With the surviving kittens safely in the box, I texted the rescue group coordinator to see if the kittens could be added to the program. The answer was a qualified yes: they'd be accepted if they came up negative on a combo test which screens for feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) and feline leukemia virus (FeLV) and if they were less than three months old.

I'd guess they're maybe five weeks old; they're big enough to eat solid food, but their eyes are still blue. I have their combo test scheduled for next Wednesday and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they pass. If not, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I took them home and set them up in the basement in a good-sized wire kennel with a soft towel, a litter box made of a canned cat food flat, some canned food and a dish of water. I went to the store and got some dry food of the type the rescue group commonly feeds kittens but was unable to find a small plastic litter box. I'll have to try the dollar store.

When I got home that evening, I spent a little time holding them. They are very afraid—I think it's safe to say that they've never interacted with people until now. However, they're plenty young enough to be socialized. It's just going to take some work and patience.

This morning I read up some more on feral kittens and decided to make them a little "cave" out of a shoe box so they can hide and feel more secure. I also left the radio on quietly so they can get used to the sound of voices. I held them a little more and checked gender; it looks like they're both males.

So that's my latest project. It certainly came out of the blue, but I'm feeling up for the challenge. And if you know anyone in the Kansas City area who wants a kitten, let me know! The rescue group has about two dozen of them and the sooner we can get them all adopted, the better.

I recently mentioned in passing that we'd adopted our foster cat, but I hadn't really told the full story. It actually happened a couple of months ago, but I was honestly a little embarrassed to admit it to the internet until now. Go ahead and say it: "I told you so."

Kaylee, who was renamed after one of my favorite "Firefly" characters, is a rather unlikely addition to our household. When I first encountered her (then named Tinkerbell) and her sister Twire in the course of volunteering with my animal rescue group, they were unequivocally the oddest cats I'd ever met. They were both clearly quite fearful, but in an incredibly passive way. I later learned that they were the only two surviving kittens of a neglected and malnourished mother. As babies, their physical growth was stunted and it's safe to say that their mental and emotional development suffered as well.

Together the two girls fed on each others' fear and they didn't start behaving halfway normally until they were separated. Still, when Kaylee came to my house she hid for a full week and didn't come out until she got lonely enough to overcome her trepidation.

Then we moved her up to my husband's recording studio. That meant he spent all night with her every day. When Kaylee decided she needed attention, she would start by winding around his feet while he worked, progressing to little nips of his ankles if he didn't take the hint. She learned to enjoy belly rubs and cuddling and now she'll put her paws up on the arm of his chair when she wants to be picked up.

My conversations with my husband started to change in tone. At first it was, "I hope she finds a family that will do thus and so for her." Then they became, "I don't want her to go to anyone who doesn't do this and this and this and this for her." It was clear that he didn't want to let her go, and so I went ahead and made it official as an early birthday gift for him.

She's not the perfect cat: she makes a huge mess playing in her water and I'm still trying to figure out the best solution for that. I did solve one problem by investing in a Modkat litter box, which completely prevents her from throwing litter all over my office. (I actually loved her new litterbox so much that I bought another one for the kitchen, which prevents the dog from getting into the box. They may be expensive—and I did save some money by getting a discontinued color—but I am a die-hard Modkat fan now.)

For now, Kaylee still lives in the studio alone, which means she doesn't get quite as much people time as the other cats. We've tried introducing the "nicer" cats (Dr. Jones and Velvet) to her, but they've been rather hostile. She is very interested in other cats, so it's sad that we haven't been able to find a match. We haven't tried either of our downstairs enemy combatants, Trillan and Xena, yet. Perhaps one of them would get along with Kaylee even though they hate each other.

Will we be fostering again? Uh, no. No, we will not. The menagerie is more than large enough, thank you. Going forward, I plan to confine my volunteer efforts to website and Facebook updates. It's safer for everyone.

Well, the freakishly shy cat who hid for a solid week after she got to our house has been blossoming since we moved her up to the recording studio. Now Tinkerbell openly hangs out on the loveseat, plays vigorously with the Turbo Scratcher I got for her, races around all evening playing with toys, and will attack the feather wand toy until she's worn out.

My husband took the photo above and said she was like that for an extended period of time, so he had no problem getting out his camera for a shot. I assume he followed up with the belly woozling that she was obviously asking for.

She's still a little wary of me because I'm the evil woman who used to coax her in, cuddle her for extended periods of time and then betray her trust by poking a pointy antibiotic pill segment down her throat, over and over and over.

She's been done with her pills for more than a week, so I think she's starting to forget about all that.

Now I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that someone will adopt her while she's still at our house so she doesn't have to go back on display in a pet store. She really doesn't have the temperament for that.

If you're interested in her, click her name in the first paragraph and fill out an application!