Ella, Cutie, and Lydia having a lazy day in their heated beds. Ella (3 years old). This particular bed, by the way, is nearly fourteen years old now. It's a little threadbare in some places, but it is still going strong. Cutie (age 26) Lydia (age 26)
Another cat corrupted Cats in my house always turn out to be pacifists. I've mentioned before that Ella, our youngest cat, had dispatched a couple of mice that were in our house when we moved back here. However, today we had, and still have a mouse in our house. My wife was screaming, and I couldn't catch it because of all the clutter that we haven't gone through yet, after moving it down from the attic. Ella went on the job immediately. However, at one point, she was looking all excited, looking all over the room, while the mouse was standing on top of the floor trim, a few inches from her head. Later, I found Ella at the bottom of the stairs. The mouse was standing in my wife's shoe right next to her, head up, not even cringing. Then Ella rubbed her head on the mouse's head as if to tell me that they were friends. So, with three cats in the house, we have a mouse and Ella has a new playmate. The other two have never been mousers. Cutie isn't even interested in them, while Lydia likes to watch them. In fact between them, during the combined 32 years of their lives, I don't think a single living thing has ever been harmed. Lydia pounced on a bird once, then lifted her paws up and watched it fly away. Cutie seems to think that, if it's not another cat, it's irrelevant.
For the first couple of years that Ella was with us, she wouldn't go near any of the heated beds that Cutie and Lydia had before she came to live with us. However, it is clear that her comfort level has risen lately.
I had to take a long break earlier because, while I was sitting at my chair in front of my computer, Cutie (one of my 26 year-olds) just climbed up and made herself a bed out of my arms, so that I had no choice but to hold her until she had had enough. Ella does that sometimes too and, although it is usually an interruption, it's a welcome one and one that I am sure to remember with longing at some point in the future. I also like that they are comfortable enough in their relationship with me to know that I'll make time for them.
I was just remembering a time when we rented a trailer in Levant, near Bangor, Maine because my wife was working in Bangor and the drive each day was too much for her. We had a spot near the end of the trailer park, so there we had a corner that was bounded on one side with a river and another with a stream, so it looked like we could let the cats outside during the day. After we had been there a couple of weeks, and I had walked the cats around the yard, I let them out. Lydia didn't come back. In her younger years, she was known to do all-nighters from time to time so I wasn't panicked, but I was concerned. I stayed up most of the night periodically calling for her. She wasn't back the next day, or that night. The following day, after she had been gone for nearly three days, I saw something move in the empty trailer next to ours. Looking more closely, I could see that it was a black cat. Lydia had found a way into the trailer, and just moved in. She hadn't left any messes so she was apparently going outside for her bathroom duties, then spending her time in this empty trailer. The door was unlocked and she came right to me when I opened it. I could see that she had slept on a chair, because there was black fur there. I don't know if she got confused and found her way into the wrong trailer, then decided to wait for us to come back for her or, which is more likely, she just decided she'd rather live on her own.
That triggered a sad memory for me regarding my first cat about 35 years ago. He didn't come back....ever! I think he was hit by a car. For 3 weeks I searched everywhere, stood at the window in my daughters bedroom which afforded the best view and would just stare outside, tears streaming down my face. I even placed an ad in the local paper in a section called "Helping Paws"...nobody ever found him, dead or alive. Not too long after that I found 2 baby tabbies on my porch every night and started feeding them and eventually took them in. They were brother and sister. One was a short hair grey tabby and his sister was a long hair. Named them Charlie and Chelsea.
I lost a cat, Cutie and Lydia's grandmother, named Little Girl. I was living in a place where it wasn't safe to let my cats outdoors, and I let someone who I didn't even know very well stay at my house for a few days since he was going through a divorce and hadn't found a new place yet. Well, Little Girl snuck past him when he opened the door while I was at work. Had he simply waited, she would have probably realized she wasn't familiar with her surrounding and come back, or at least found a place to hide near the house. Instead, he chased after her trying to catch her. Of course, since she didn't know this guy, she ran, and by the time that I got home, there was no way of knowing where she might have gone. I spent hours walking the streets calling for her. I had a back room that had internal and external doors, so I closed that room to my other cats so that they wouldn't get out, and left the outside door open so that she could get inside. I took the next day off of work and waited around, hoping she'd return, but I never saw her again. I still think about her, alone, afraid, lost, and in a hostile area. I don't know if she was killed in traffic, or killed by a stray dog, or kids who were known to hunt cats. I hope that she was taken in by someone, but I don't think that was likely, mostly because there weren't very many people in the Rio Grande Valley who appreciated cats once they were no longer kittens.
Yours is a sad story also. I've always blamed my daughter for what happened. She was about 13 at the time. muffin was mainly an indoor cat but we'd let him out occasionally but would watch for him to come back in, he would jump up on the front living room window and scratch and we knew he wanted in, We all went out one night and my daughter stayed home and I told her to make sure if the cat goes out that she listen to let him in because he was never out long. She fell asleep. When we got home I noticed that our mail box which was on a post at the end of the driveway was crooked but it was dark so we went in the house. I discover the cat is gone and went back to look at the mailbox but there were no signs of a hit cat anywhere. We walked the streets at night calling him but nothing. In the morning I looked for signs of blood around the mailbox but found nothing, so don't know what happened. Thinking maybe someone swerved to miss my cat and hit the mailbox and he took off and got lost or he was hit but not bloody and the person took him away. This brings tears to my eyes just thinking about him.
If you've ever had a car that was on its last legs, or another type of machine that you couldn't afford to fix or replace, but wanted to get as much use out of it as you could, perhaps even hoping that you might be able to actually fix it, that's the way that I feel about Lydia right now. She's twenty-six years old and not very interested in eating anymore, probably because she throws up some of what she does eat. She has renal failure, and there isn't a fix, especially not at twenty-six. Still, I am not ready to part with her and won't be as long as she doesn't appear to be suffering. So, I buy an endless variety of premium canned cat foods, particularly those that are made with gravy, in order to keep her interested in eating. She won't eat the same type of food twice in one week, so I keep rotating foods, and always buy any new premium food that I come across because if it's new, she'll try it at least once. I sprinkle a nutrient supplement into her food, but I can't use much of it at a time or she won't eat it, and then I offer her things that I wouldn't ordinarily feed a cat. Treats, for example. She will almost always eat a treat if I offer it to her so I buy cat treats that have as much nutrients in it as I can find, and offer them to her often. If I were to give her a bowl of treats, she wouldn't eat any of them but when I offer them to her one or two at a time, she'll eat them. Also she seems to do well with real foods so I buy chicken and other meats for her, cooking them without salt or any other spices, and offer them to her one piece at a time. She will eat a surprising number of small pieces of chicken and rarely throws it up. Pretty much anything she will eat, I'll feed her now. She has gained some weight back, although she's still very thin, and she has more strength than she did for a while. For a time, if she went outdoors at all, she would just sit by the back steps grazing on grass, which would later come up. Now she walks around the yard. She has moments of playfulness. Not jumping into the air playfulness but she will swing at anything she can reach without getting up from her bed. She goes up and down the stairs a surprising number of times throughout the day. I don't think she'll be with me too much longer but am hoping she can make it to her twenty-seventh birthday in December. Her sister, from the same litter, is amazingly healthy for being the same age. She takes Cosequin for arthritis and has some hearing problems. I think she'd like me to believe that she was completely deaf but I know she has some hearing left. I suspect she uses her deafness to her advantage. I'm going to bring her in to the vet for her hearing and a checkup, while she's there but what I usually get from them whenever I present them with a problem is, "She's twenty-six, what do you expect?" Still, if it's something that might be able to be corrected, I'd like to fix it. She started to lose a little bit of weight a few month ago and I began worrying about her. But since I've been cooking for her sister, she has been getting her share of it, as well as some of the treats, and she has bulked up considerably. If anything, she might be considered slightly overweight right now, but not scaringly so. I have had people recommend raw meats for cats and it makes sense, since that's what they'd be eating in the wild but I have rarely had a cat that would eat raw meat, and they look at raw meat
That's an awful feeling, not knowing, and having every reason to suspect the worst. It's been years, and I still cry over it.
@Ken Anderson It has been said, quite truthfully, IMO, that "You don't own a cat. The cat "owns" you".
Today, when it was beginning to get dark, I called for Ella, since I don't let the cats outside at night. She didn't come, as she usually does. I stood on the back porch, calling and whistling for her. Then I went to the back of the yard, and called for her some more. I walked along the tracks since she seems to have something going on on someone's yard on the other side of the tracks. Nothing. When I got back to the house, she was lying on the back porch pretending she had been there all along. It amuses me, but it's not the first time she's done that. Rather than coming when I call her, if she's anywhere but in our own yard, she likes to try to sneak past me and pretend that she's been waiting for me.
I have had to put Ella in charge of Cutie when she's outside. Cutie is deaf now, or mostly deaf. I don't know for a fact whether its a deafness of convenience or whether she really can't hear me, as she sometimes does, but mostly she does not react to anything that I say to her. Anyhow, a week or so ago, it was nearing dusk and I was trying to get the cats back in. I couldn't find Cutie, and calling her didn't help. After walking around the yard, to the tracks, and the vacant lot next door, I still couldn't find her. Ella was there, so I asked her where Cutie was. Oddly enough, she started looking around, then pointed to a tree in the front of the yard. By that, I mean she locked her head into place like she does when she sees a bird or squirrel. Following the direction she was looking, there was Cutie under the tree, hard to see because she's black and was in the shadows of the tree. I worry about Cutie because she's so old, and because I can't just call for her like I used to. Today, I couldn't find her again. After exhausting my efforts, looking everywhere I could think of, I let Ella out; she had been in the house. Moments later, Ella came around the side of the house with Cutie. She probably knows where Cutie is all the time, so it's a matter of communication.
That is a cute story,,,pardon the pun! Pets are sweet, and will help you where they can, even cats. I still remember the cat that flung himself at the dog to prevent it from attacking his little person on the bicycle. Some cats have alerted their owners to a fire in the house, or another person if there are breathing difficulties observed, like a child with a monitor who stops breathing. They do what they can..nice story!