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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
Not that much after I left an apartment and moved into a house (with a relationship that was not healthy at the time and would not get better, no matter how I tried), in addition to the two dogs that were present, my ex and I fostered a mother cat and four kittens. Two of those kittens we then kept, and I got to experience the joys of kittens with the zoomies and sharp pointy bits while I was trying to sleep. And the joys of kittens who were very interested in escaping their confinement, and very good at it once they recognized that the hook and loop fasteners that held up the mesh weren't strong enough to defeat a determined kitten.
As the kittens got older, we found out that they knew how to use puppy flaps when I discovered one of them in the back yard. And thus, I then had to start taking the dogs out for scheduled time in the back yard, to prevent the cats from having unscheduled time in the yard at all. But I liked my cats, and they seemed to be okay with me. They still got out when on trips, occasionally, much to my consternation, because I was usually the one that was tasked with retrieving them from their wanderings before they bolted off into nature, to not be seen again.
One of the cats had a heart problem that manifested in not until it was too late to do anything about it. And so I lost my first cat within the first few years of having had one. His sister was fine and didn't have the same. And for a small while, there was only one cat, but then there was another. And a different house for exploring with. And a neighbor cat who liked to beef.
The adoption agency, in this case, had an entire large house for all the cats they were looking to adopt out. I was looking among the cats, and one seemed cute, and then she hopped up into a spot that I thought was perfect to reach in and pet her. Instead, she punched me on the hand. Which is also how I learned she had been front-paw-declawed by others before she came to the cat house. I thought ill-tempered brats had no place in my house, so I put the thought of that cat from my mind and continued looking at the other cats that were in the house.
I was sitting in the room for the cats that needed quiet, trying to decide whether I wanted to adopt a cat named Sabre, even though it was a house with another cat and with some fairly rambunctious dogs that might not have been good for Sabre, when a cat appeared at the top of the stairs, marched into the room, jumped into my lap, pointedly sat herself down and started purring.
I am not foolish, so I thought this was the Cat Distribution System at work. But this was the same cat that had punched me earlier in the visit that now was on my lap, explaining in proper felinese that the decision had been made and this was the cat that I was going to take back with me. I hadn't realized it, but apparently my ex and the keeper of the cats at the house had noticed that after punching me for invading her space, the cat seemed to realize that this particular human was trainable, or at least respected boundaries. That cat began to follow me as I was looking at the other cats, until eventually marching up to me and sitting in my lap. The matter had already been decided, and I was the last person to know.
We took that brat cat home. Right now, she's perched on top of a chair, looking out at her kingdom.
My ex constructed outdoor beds for cats in the cold, because the neighbor cat that liked to beef also liked to visit, and because the neighborhood cats were around. So eventually one of those beds caught another cat who wanted to stay, and then there were three. That one I named "fate," because I knew we were going to keep her, regardless of whether it was feasible, and I was resigned to my fate about it.
That gave me a tabby, a blue, and a tortie. Number four, a black kitten with a knot-tail, showed up one morning while I was loading a car, and then jumped right into the back seat as easy as you please. Clearly used to humans, and car trips, or something. This had to be someone's cat, so we figured it would be a better idea to hold on to the cat and see if some lost cat notices started showing up in the neighborhood, so that we could return him to the people who lost him. But no notices appeared, so now there was another cat.
I stayed in that terrible relationship until both of the old dogs died, but when I left, I only took one cat with me, because I only felt that I could handle one cat on my own. The ill-behaved brat who hit me, because she was "my cat," and all the others could work well with anyone. I probably could have taken all of them and managed them well, but I was going from having a house to keep them separated in to a room, and they probably weren't going to get along nearly well enough in proximity. Brat cat, after all, believes that her territory is the entire house, and when the kitten wants to play, she basically runs away and hisses at him. So I made the best decision I could and took "my cat," and here is the spot where I have to admit that I don't know what's happened to the other three. My ex took them with her, and I'm sure that she believed she was better at taking care of cats and dogs than I ever would be. So I have one cat.
When I returned to my house, and then I got housemates, there was another cat. One who had the same kind of idea that my cat had about her territory, and who wanted to beef with brat cat about it. So, with enough house to keep them separated, the two of them rarely saw each other until the housemate's cat died of cardiac arrest. There was also another housemate and another cat, but that cat mostly kept to one space that wouldn't see either of the other two, because that cat liked to express her displeasure with the situation in urinary ways. Eventually, there was another visit to an adoption space, and there are currently three cats in the house: Brat Cat, Nurse Cat, and Pee Terrorist. Nurse Cat takes just as seriously the need to make sure the housemate doesn't do anything that might hurt, like moving. And while she's much more mellow about the presence of other cats, Brat cat is still a hissy bitch who believes the house is hers and no other cat can intrude on it. We still find ways of making sure Nurse Cat can come out to explore, though.
Having a cat (or more) makes you part of a community. One where you can share pictures of your adorable little floofs, or videos where you have to be a barrier to women in technology (because the cat is climbing on keyboards and printers and is unrepentant about it), or where your cat occasionally shows up on the virtual meeting and you have to pay the cat tax to all the others who want to see. (One of the things that has been an unexpected benefit of virtual meetings and such as a disease mitigation measure is that I have gotten to see so many more cats and pets and others on the screen where I would not have otherwise.) Or where you see how clever they are. Or how anti-clever they are, which seems to have settled as a stereotype of orange-colored cats. There's also the Cat Distribution System, where supposedly the right cat for the right person appears at the time they are best suited to receive them, so the community of people who are actively taking care of cats swells and shifts as some join up and others leave, hopefully after a long and well cared-for life.
Unlike dogs, or so we are told, cats decided they were going to have a better time of life if they became useful to the humans, rather than having useful-to-human traits selected for and bred in to them, like wolves eventually becoming dogs. Because of that, cats also had to learn how to communicate better with us humans. Which sometimes leads to the question of whether cats can conceive of tax benefits and waffle irons when humans try to talk back to them. And learning that cats have figured out their best vocal range is the same one that human babies use when they want to get attention. Cats as a species are pretty smart, even if the one that you have is not quite top of the class. The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz did a "Cat Translation Guide" episode recently, to help humans have good communications with their cats, and even they had a little bit of "cat sounds and behaviors need context, because sometimes the same thing means different things in different contexts." They spend a fair amount of time on the story of a cat that learned to use talking buttons to communicate with their owner, and the eventually sprawling communication system that resulted from that (Including the "mad" button getting used a lot.) It's a good story, even though it ends, as so many stories do, with the humans outliving the cat.
Living with a cat is an interesting thing, because cats are fiercely independent and creatures that want to be in your business at the same time. Brat Cat likes to wave her tail in my face as she parades back and forth in front of me when she wants pets. Or when she doesn't want pets or snuggles, but she does want me to pay attention to her and not whatever the glowbox has on. At other times, she's content to find a high place, usually the back of a chair or a couch, curl up, and then either nap or observe the world from a high perspective. When it's close to the time where she should get fed, there's plenty of meowing and getting in my face. (Mind, her idea of "close to the time when she should get fed" is "when I come home from work, regardless of how close that is to the actual time.") We've gotten her trained to understand that a specific alarm tone going off means that it's time to get fed. Which means she doubles and redoubles her efforts to yell and lead me to the spot where she gets fed, as if we have forgotten. (Sometimes I get distracted or involved in what I'm doing right there, but I don't forget.) When it's time for bed, she'll come up to the bed, and then, if things aren't arranged to her liking (i.e. I'm under a blanket), she'll yell about that, too, until I'm situated properly, and she can guard me while I fall asleep. Guard me by sleeping on my chest, or my legs, or my midsection. And while I know she goes off in the night, often times by when the alarm goes off in the morning, she's back, and in her usual guarding position. If there are nightmares or things of the insubstantial that tried to haunt and hurt me, I have no doubt she would be after them to chase them away in the same way she wants to chase away other cats.
She's my cat, even if she's a brat, and she wants to make sure that I understand the relationship we have with each other. I handle the logistics of feeding, litter, and ensuring she has a nice place to sleep, she handles the logistics of love, naps, and the occasional bout of the zoomies, especially when we can get her hunting instincts engaged with laser toys. She's mostly self-sufficient, which is great for me, and she tolerates my excesses of snuggles and love well, and if I'm being too rough for her at the time, she yells at me and scampers off. She has complaints about the speed of the service, and the fact that all of her meals seem to be soup. (Because she has some kidney function issues, due to being a senior cat, her wet food has additional wet added to it, to make sure she takes in enough moisture.) She complains when there are people on the bed and they have not made themselves properly arranged for cat. She complains about the existence of other cats.
I take pictures of her when she's being srs cat, when she's asleep, when she's blocking me from getting up in the morning. And others have taken pictures of her curled up next to me, asleep, when she's on my back on the blanket I'm using to keep myself warm. Cats make great icebreakers between people, and they're almost always involved in some kind of great story to tell to others, sometimes the ones that make the most sense to other pet-owned. Supposedly, the love of a pet is unconditional, but I think hers is much more in a reciprocal exchange. If I take care of this Brat Cat, she'll give me love.
By putting her tail in my face. Again.
Not that much after I left an apartment and moved into a house (with a relationship that was not healthy at the time and would not get better, no matter how I tried), in addition to the two dogs that were present, my ex and I fostered a mother cat and four kittens. Two of those kittens we then kept, and I got to experience the joys of kittens with the zoomies and sharp pointy bits while I was trying to sleep. And the joys of kittens who were very interested in escaping their confinement, and very good at it once they recognized that the hook and loop fasteners that held up the mesh weren't strong enough to defeat a determined kitten.
As the kittens got older, we found out that they knew how to use puppy flaps when I discovered one of them in the back yard. And thus, I then had to start taking the dogs out for scheduled time in the back yard, to prevent the cats from having unscheduled time in the yard at all. But I liked my cats, and they seemed to be okay with me. They still got out when on trips, occasionally, much to my consternation, because I was usually the one that was tasked with retrieving them from their wanderings before they bolted off into nature, to not be seen again.
One of the cats had a heart problem that manifested in not until it was too late to do anything about it. And so I lost my first cat within the first few years of having had one. His sister was fine and didn't have the same. And for a small while, there was only one cat, but then there was another. And a different house for exploring with. And a neighbor cat who liked to beef.
The adoption agency, in this case, had an entire large house for all the cats they were looking to adopt out. I was looking among the cats, and one seemed cute, and then she hopped up into a spot that I thought was perfect to reach in and pet her. Instead, she punched me on the hand. Which is also how I learned she had been front-paw-declawed by others before she came to the cat house. I thought ill-tempered brats had no place in my house, so I put the thought of that cat from my mind and continued looking at the other cats that were in the house.
I was sitting in the room for the cats that needed quiet, trying to decide whether I wanted to adopt a cat named Sabre, even though it was a house with another cat and with some fairly rambunctious dogs that might not have been good for Sabre, when a cat appeared at the top of the stairs, marched into the room, jumped into my lap, pointedly sat herself down and started purring.
I am not foolish, so I thought this was the Cat Distribution System at work. But this was the same cat that had punched me earlier in the visit that now was on my lap, explaining in proper felinese that the decision had been made and this was the cat that I was going to take back with me. I hadn't realized it, but apparently my ex and the keeper of the cats at the house had noticed that after punching me for invading her space, the cat seemed to realize that this particular human was trainable, or at least respected boundaries. That cat began to follow me as I was looking at the other cats, until eventually marching up to me and sitting in my lap. The matter had already been decided, and I was the last person to know.
We took that brat cat home. Right now, she's perched on top of a chair, looking out at her kingdom.
My ex constructed outdoor beds for cats in the cold, because the neighbor cat that liked to beef also liked to visit, and because the neighborhood cats were around. So eventually one of those beds caught another cat who wanted to stay, and then there were three. That one I named "fate," because I knew we were going to keep her, regardless of whether it was feasible, and I was resigned to my fate about it.
That gave me a tabby, a blue, and a tortie. Number four, a black kitten with a knot-tail, showed up one morning while I was loading a car, and then jumped right into the back seat as easy as you please. Clearly used to humans, and car trips, or something. This had to be someone's cat, so we figured it would be a better idea to hold on to the cat and see if some lost cat notices started showing up in the neighborhood, so that we could return him to the people who lost him. But no notices appeared, so now there was another cat.
I stayed in that terrible relationship until both of the old dogs died, but when I left, I only took one cat with me, because I only felt that I could handle one cat on my own. The ill-behaved brat who hit me, because she was "my cat," and all the others could work well with anyone. I probably could have taken all of them and managed them well, but I was going from having a house to keep them separated in to a room, and they probably weren't going to get along nearly well enough in proximity. Brat cat, after all, believes that her territory is the entire house, and when the kitten wants to play, she basically runs away and hisses at him. So I made the best decision I could and took "my cat," and here is the spot where I have to admit that I don't know what's happened to the other three. My ex took them with her, and I'm sure that she believed she was better at taking care of cats and dogs than I ever would be. So I have one cat.
When I returned to my house, and then I got housemates, there was another cat. One who had the same kind of idea that my cat had about her territory, and who wanted to beef with brat cat about it. So, with enough house to keep them separated, the two of them rarely saw each other until the housemate's cat died of cardiac arrest. There was also another housemate and another cat, but that cat mostly kept to one space that wouldn't see either of the other two, because that cat liked to express her displeasure with the situation in urinary ways. Eventually, there was another visit to an adoption space, and there are currently three cats in the house: Brat Cat, Nurse Cat, and Pee Terrorist. Nurse Cat takes just as seriously the need to make sure the housemate doesn't do anything that might hurt, like moving. And while she's much more mellow about the presence of other cats, Brat cat is still a hissy bitch who believes the house is hers and no other cat can intrude on it. We still find ways of making sure Nurse Cat can come out to explore, though.
Having a cat (or more) makes you part of a community. One where you can share pictures of your adorable little floofs, or videos where you have to be a barrier to women in technology (because the cat is climbing on keyboards and printers and is unrepentant about it), or where your cat occasionally shows up on the virtual meeting and you have to pay the cat tax to all the others who want to see. (One of the things that has been an unexpected benefit of virtual meetings and such as a disease mitigation measure is that I have gotten to see so many more cats and pets and others on the screen where I would not have otherwise.) Or where you see how clever they are. Or how anti-clever they are, which seems to have settled as a stereotype of orange-colored cats. There's also the Cat Distribution System, where supposedly the right cat for the right person appears at the time they are best suited to receive them, so the community of people who are actively taking care of cats swells and shifts as some join up and others leave, hopefully after a long and well cared-for life.
Unlike dogs, or so we are told, cats decided they were going to have a better time of life if they became useful to the humans, rather than having useful-to-human traits selected for and bred in to them, like wolves eventually becoming dogs. Because of that, cats also had to learn how to communicate better with us humans. Which sometimes leads to the question of whether cats can conceive of tax benefits and waffle irons when humans try to talk back to them. And learning that cats have figured out their best vocal range is the same one that human babies use when they want to get attention. Cats as a species are pretty smart, even if the one that you have is not quite top of the class. The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz did a "Cat Translation Guide" episode recently, to help humans have good communications with their cats, and even they had a little bit of "cat sounds and behaviors need context, because sometimes the same thing means different things in different contexts." They spend a fair amount of time on the story of a cat that learned to use talking buttons to communicate with their owner, and the eventually sprawling communication system that resulted from that (Including the "mad" button getting used a lot.) It's a good story, even though it ends, as so many stories do, with the humans outliving the cat.
Living with a cat is an interesting thing, because cats are fiercely independent and creatures that want to be in your business at the same time. Brat Cat likes to wave her tail in my face as she parades back and forth in front of me when she wants pets. Or when she doesn't want pets or snuggles, but she does want me to pay attention to her and not whatever the glowbox has on. At other times, she's content to find a high place, usually the back of a chair or a couch, curl up, and then either nap or observe the world from a high perspective. When it's close to the time where she should get fed, there's plenty of meowing and getting in my face. (Mind, her idea of "close to the time when she should get fed" is "when I come home from work, regardless of how close that is to the actual time.") We've gotten her trained to understand that a specific alarm tone going off means that it's time to get fed. Which means she doubles and redoubles her efforts to yell and lead me to the spot where she gets fed, as if we have forgotten. (Sometimes I get distracted or involved in what I'm doing right there, but I don't forget.) When it's time for bed, she'll come up to the bed, and then, if things aren't arranged to her liking (i.e. I'm under a blanket), she'll yell about that, too, until I'm situated properly, and she can guard me while I fall asleep. Guard me by sleeping on my chest, or my legs, or my midsection. And while I know she goes off in the night, often times by when the alarm goes off in the morning, she's back, and in her usual guarding position. If there are nightmares or things of the insubstantial that tried to haunt and hurt me, I have no doubt she would be after them to chase them away in the same way she wants to chase away other cats.
She's my cat, even if she's a brat, and she wants to make sure that I understand the relationship we have with each other. I handle the logistics of feeding, litter, and ensuring she has a nice place to sleep, she handles the logistics of love, naps, and the occasional bout of the zoomies, especially when we can get her hunting instincts engaged with laser toys. She's mostly self-sufficient, which is great for me, and she tolerates my excesses of snuggles and love well, and if I'm being too rough for her at the time, she yells at me and scampers off. She has complaints about the speed of the service, and the fact that all of her meals seem to be soup. (Because she has some kidney function issues, due to being a senior cat, her wet food has additional wet added to it, to make sure she takes in enough moisture.) She complains when there are people on the bed and they have not made themselves properly arranged for cat. She complains about the existence of other cats.
I take pictures of her when she's being srs cat, when she's asleep, when she's blocking me from getting up in the morning. And others have taken pictures of her curled up next to me, asleep, when she's on my back on the blanket I'm using to keep myself warm. Cats make great icebreakers between people, and they're almost always involved in some kind of great story to tell to others, sometimes the ones that make the most sense to other pet-owned. Supposedly, the love of a pet is unconditional, but I think hers is much more in a reciprocal exchange. If I take care of this Brat Cat, she'll give me love.
By putting her tail in my face. Again.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-02 04:25 am (UTC)ownerscarers in that way. Thanks for sharing about your Brat Cat and other cats.no subject
Date: 2024-12-02 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-02 07:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-02 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-03 06:58 am (UTC)(also 😿 but I knew what I was in for when I opened the post)
no subject
Date: 2024-12-03 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-04 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-04 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-04 04:18 am (UTC)The pets are passed on to all those who well let me pet them.