Bucks Up In Binkys

Two years ago, I received a pair of Christmas socks from a friend that had pom poms on the back. When I washed the socks the poms fell off. I threw three of them away, but I missed seeing the fourth one. Sneaky Pete found it and started playing with it. Which was strange, because he does not play at all, never mind with a toy. The first night, he played with that pom for three hours. We keep Mini Binky in a china cup when not in use. For a year, we spent hours digging Mini Binky out from under the sofa, the TV stand, the china cabinet and the side board. We could not find it for over a month last summer and finally lost it forever in early November. We tried buying a similar cat toy at the pet store but Petey would not touch it. We tried buying anything in the craft store that looks like his Mini Binky, but that was not good enough either. When we really could not find Mini Binky, we decided we would go to JC Penny where the socks were purchased from when the holiday stuff came out, in the hope they would carry the same socks this year. Just in time, I received a JC Penny gift certificate! And yes, there were binky socks – a whole big display of them! I bought four pair, so Petey has 16 binkys to get him through the year. Of course, two days after we were bucks up in binkys, the original Mini Binky presented itself. It is cute to see this intense cat play. Sometimes, we are awakened by a soft carpet scuffing noise in the middle of the night. We will find Sneaky Pete in the office, quietly batting his Mini Bink around.

Neutron

A couple of summers ago, we trapped a kitten to take to the animal shelter. We saw the kitten running and crying along the back of the buildings across the alley from our house. He was starving, so it took less than a minute for him to go into the Have A Heart trap. The shelter was full, so we set the kitten up in the spare bedroom. He spent a lot of time hiding and was very quiet. After about a day, we figured out he was injured. The pads of his front paws were burned. We cleaned them up and bandaged his front feet. After that he started to come around. He started eating anyway. It took a week before he would come out from hiding when we would go in the room. We brought our largest cat, Uncle Onslow, in the house to be with him. Onslow let the kitten climb all over him and curled up with him. They were often seen asleep in a cuddler bed together. After ten days, we let the kitten come into the main part of the house for visits. The second day there was a lot of scary loud noises (scary if you are a kitten) and I lost him for about six hours. I finally found him under a recliner chair. The fourth day he was allowed in the main part of the house he started playing and running around. Tom named him Rube, but once this kitten was healed, and not as scared, we realized he needed to be called Jimmy Neutron, from the cartoon. Jimmy is always saying "Gotta Blast” in the cartoon. This kitten ‘blasted’ everywhere! Even Sneaky Pete was curious about him and Petey hates all other cats. We put an ad in the paper for the kitten and got three calls. We took him to the first person who called. To date, this kitten was terrified of every human, except Tom and I. We drove him to Topeka and put the kitten in the arms of the most wonderful man. The kitten lay relaxed in his arms. The man was very gentle with him and they seemed to hit it off. I cried half the way home. Tom and I agreed that if we had him one more day we were going to have to keep him. The kitten is doing well in his new home.

Ginger

We had another kitten move into our cattery in October. She was an orange tabby that I named Ginger. It took us five days to trap her. She was so tiny that she could walk through the fence and had enough Moxie to walk right inside the cattery building through the pet door. We found her asleep nestled in the middle of our cats more than once. The second she sensed us in the room, she would shoot back out the cat door, through the fence and was gone. She was a lot younger than we thought, probably late in her fourth week or early in the fifth week. Once cold, rainy day I saw her go into the cattery through the pet door. We waited a few minutes, then I snuck out to the fenced area with a pillow. I tiptoed to the pet door and squeezed the pillow up against it. Tom went inside the cattery building. The kitten saw him and tried to run out the cat door, hitting the pillow. Tom was able to capture her, since she could not get outside. Our six cats were letting her eat their food; they groomed her and let her sleep curled up with them. The knotheads, anyway! Ginger was scared of everything. She had worms so bad she could not keep any food in. We wormed her once a week for two weeks. We just got that under control and I heard her cough. I started her on antibiotics from the first cough, but she kept getting sicker. First one lung filled with fluid, then the second. We tried four kinds of antibiotics, a nebulizer, coughaging, and essential oils. She slept on a heating pad. We made chicken or fish broth and fed it to her with an eye dropper. Tom and I checked on her six and seven times during the night but she didn’t make it. Every night when Tom would get home from work he would put Ginger in the crook of his arm and walk around patting her, singing ‘Ginger kitty, Ginger Sweety, Ginger Peachy” to try to comfort her. We both got way too attached to her. Tom buried her in a box with lots of toys. He said she never got to play here on earth and he wanted to make sure she had lots of toys to play with wherever she is now.

The Brothers

I am going to introduce The Brothers today. They are Emmitt and Onslow. They are both butterscotch tabbies. They were born late spring of 1999. Their mother kept them in the insulation under an old house behind us. My neighbor heard the kittens crying and realized that their mother had died. Their mother was a stray and did not survive internal parasites. My neighbor waited until she saw the older couple leave in the car. She climbed over their fence with a box and got the kittens out and took them home. She fed them several times a day for about three weeks. By early summer, they were able to come outside. I used to garden at 5am, before I had to leave for work. The kittens would come over and help me. One afternoon, I brought the whole litter in the house after we had gardened and we all took a nap on the couch. My husband came home early and busted us! Tom and I used to walk the dog around town every night. One very cold winter night when we were walking, I kept hearing a cat talking. I stopped and saw Onslow trotting along behind us to catch up. He had followed us. I put him under my coat and asked my neighbor Gayle if we could keep him. Of course, she said yes. Later that winter, Emmett kept coming to me when I would be in the yard. It was so cold that winter. I would pick him up and tuck him under my coat until he stopped shaking. By the end of the winter, I couldn’t stand it any more and we brought him in the house too.

Emmett started working Tom early on. He would fall on Tom’s shoe and lay upside down looking up at him. He still does that. He is our most affectionate cat. His knickname is Scan –Man. He loves to have his whole faced rubbed. If you hold your cupped hand out, he will jam his head into your hand for a ‘cat scan.’ His brother is very protective of him and will still come over and get between any other cat or dog that looks like it might hurt him. His brother has grown to huge proportions, as did one other cat in that litter. (The neighbors took that one). Onslow has the knick names Two-Ton and Uncle Onslow. Two-Ton for his weight; and Uncle Onslow because he loves kittens. All the other cats hate young kittens. Onslow is always the first to adopt a new kitten. He trains it and lets the kitten play all over him. Once he teaches a kitten some manners, the rest of the cats will acquiesce and accept a kitten. Onslow’s favorite tactic is to lay on a kitten until it becomes submissive. At his weight, that seems to be very effective. We know that Onslow used to eat at both neighbors houses as well as ours. We had hoped that he would lose weight once we built the cattery and was only eating at one place, but that has not happened. For a large cat, he is very graceful. I watch him play with the other cats and jump high up to catch a bug. The brothers are the only two cats we will let out of the cattery to be in the yard with us if we are outside. They still love to garden. Of course, Onslow will first go to Gayle’s frot porch in case she left food there! Tom says he was a Hobbit in another life. He has first breakfast, second breakfast, a snack, lunch, a snack, supper, then late supper! The brothers are named after two of the male characters in the British comedy Keeping Up Appearances, for those of you who may recognize the names.

Dobbie

Dobbie is named after the house elf in the Harry Potter novels. One summer, for about two days, every time I would go in the garage I would see what looked like a rat scurrying and hiding. With all the cats we have, that didn’t seem likely. I finally figured out it was a kitten, about five weeks old. That is way too young to be away from mom. I got Tom and we cornered it against the wall in the garage. The kitten was so small it crawled into the inside of a concrete building block that is part of the garage foundation. Tom put on a pair of gloves, reached in and pulled him out. The kitten was so tiny, but he hissed and made ‘spat’ noises at Tom. I remember how funny Tom thought that was. Here he is, a large grown man and the kitten who, weighed about a pound, thought he could take Tom. This kitten wrecked havoc on our cats. The only cat that would tolerate the kitten was Uncle Onslow. He would let that kitten totally trash him all day long without losing patience. At the time, we were feeding a feral female cat named Newt (After the little girl in Aliens because she was as tough as that little girl in the movie). Newt would wrap both of her front legs around Dobbie’ s neck and smash him into the floor so he could not move. She would then give him the roughest grooming you ever saw. When Dobbie was older, she taught him how to play and hunt. For such a tiny kitten, he grew into a large, long completely grey cat. He walks low slung, like his ancestors, the big cats. His legs are thick and heavily muscled. Tom says he is a photographers dream because he is the perfect grayscale. For those who only know digital photography, you would not understand that comment. As a young cat, he would stay out at night. When you would let him in first thing in the morning, he would blast through the house and leap onto the bed to visit anyone who was still asleep. He got the nickname The Trampler from that. He would do what my sister calls Pistons (the kneading cats do with the their front feet) all across the bed while chortling, talking and purring as if telling you everything he saw during the night. Dobbie was known as the house elf because he managed to remove everything that was on any horizontal surface anywhere in the house. It was common to find the dining room tablecloth, along with every that was on the table, lying on the floor when we would get home from work. We were always looking for the TV remote. We found a home for Dobbie with a woman from work who is wheel chair bound. She asked that we keep him until he was litter box trained, since that is hard for her to do from a wheel chair. We were supposed to go on vacation for a week at a cabin by a lake. We took him with us. He was very quiet on the ride there. The first night at the cabin he was very sick. Half way through the vacation we took him to a veterinarian to have him put down, since he was nearly comatose. The vet said he could save the cat. Tom and I both laughed and asked for how much money. We had seven cats at home. We didn’t need another one. He told us $50. We were expecting $150 to $300, so we said sure. We went back two days later, on the way home and picked him up. He had some kind of kitty ick disease that led to dehydration. We think maybe his mother had it and died from it, but we will never know. We just don’t think a kitten that young would leave its’ mother willingly. Tom told me I had to drive home. He sat in the passenger seat in the truck with the kitten in his arms the whole five hour drive home. That kitten worked him with every ounce of cuteness he had in him. He looked up into Toms eyes the whole time. He would open his mouth wide and give a small pitiful meow every once in awhile. When we pulled into the driveway, I said ‘we aren’t giving that kitten away, are we?” Tom looked at me and said his home was here.

Toula

We have one other female we call Toula, after the character in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Toula is a four year old calico. She is the first cat I picked out myself. All the other cats found me and moved in whether I liked it or not. We just lost a calico female, the first animal I owned that did not live out a natural life. I went to the Cat Association in Topeka, which is a no kill shelter. They deemed me ‘un-cat worthy.’ Yes, that is what the woman actually called me. It never occurred to me that I would not be allowed to adopt an animal. I had no idea what to say. One of our chain pet stores has cats from Riley County Humane Shelter that are up for adoption. Toula was there. Riley County has an army base. Toulas’ owners were shipped to Iraq. Our home was quite a change for her. For a year, she would not spend much time around our cats. She was very aloof and not at all affectionate. She had asthma. When I brought her outside of the kennel building into the outdoor pen we have for the cats, she was scared and tried to climb back into my arms. We wonder if she ever went outside the first two years of her life (or even saw other cats) when she lived in Riley County. Now we call her the snow leopard because she won’t go inside until she has to. She loves it outside. She plays in the snow and will sit out in the rain. Once she found Padme, she became a different cat. She started playing with all of our cats and snuggles with Dobbie for both warmth and comfort. She started blasting around the outdoor pen and pouncing on the other cats. We have her in the house a lot because she is a total goofball and we love to watch her play. Her favorite game is to chase the red laser dot. We think her asthma was stress related, as we have not seen her have an asthma attack since Padme came along.

Padme

Padme is our youngest cat. She was born in the summer of 2005. She is black and white with a dot on her chin. My husband is a Star Wars fan. He named her after the Natalie Portman character Queen Senator Padme Amidala. I thought that was a lot of name for something that weighed 2 pounds. Padme was adopted by our only other female cat, Toula. I found Toula grooming her in our kitty paddock one afternoon. At first I thought that we had a hole in the fence, but then I saw the kitten run to the fence and push her head, then her body through the 2x4 inch fencing. I caught her by our shed. She had a bad burn on her nose. I found out later in conversation with someone on the street that they saw her fall out from under a car that was parked on Main street by the bar. She walked through an abandoned lot and saw our cats and made herself at home. She stayed in our house for two months until she got big enough to not walk through fences. I asked my husband to put an ad in the paper for a kitten. I meant for him to say we had a kitten that was looking for a good home. Instead the put an ad in that said kitten found. Like anyone is going to call us and say they were looking for their kitten. Finally, he admitted that he like her and wanted to keep her. She has earned her keep. Toula was adopted a year earlier and was not part of the pride yet. The other cats were picking on her. We were having to separate Pete from the rest of the cats because he was attacking them. Padme ended up being the tie that binds them all together. A week before we were going to put Padme out with the rest of the cats, we brought Toula in and left them together in the house. We figured that she wanted the kitten, she could just help her out. That way, when we put the kitten in with everyone else, she would already have a bond with Toula. This seemed to help Toula with the other cats. She was motherly with the kitten, so she started hitting the other cats when they would come around. They stopped bugging her. Then the kitten starting pouncing and attacking all of them with no regard to the prides hierarchy. If she was cold or tired, she would insinuate herself in the middle of the boy cats and sleep where it was warmest. Toula played with her, then realized she could play with the other cats too. When Padme was holding her own with our bigger cats and had muscled up some, we started bringing her inside to be with Pete, under supervision. He hated her. He would growl at her and hit her hard. She would just walk right back in his face and take it again. About a month later, we started seeing Pete play, alone, using the same moves he saw the kitten do. Another month went by and he began playing with the kitten. It sounded horrible, like he was really pissed at her. But she would always go back for more. When winter came, we started letting Padme sleep with us. Pete was annoyed and would leave. But he got cold enough at night to come back. By spring we were able to put Pete outside in the kennel with the other cats for short visits. By summer, Pete was able to stay outside in the kitty paddock with the other cats for a day. Their kennel is an 8x10 building with 720 square feet of fenced, covered outdoor space. The outside space has grassy areas, benches, a tiki hut, and lots of plants. Inside is a feeding area, beds and an interior window where they can watch Tom in his shop. Pete does OK in there now, he is not happiest in there but we feel we have accomplished a lot with him. Padme literally brought all the cats together. She is a total goof, into everything and has boundless energy. She has no fear. She runs headlong into things without a care. She will run full speed across the floor and turn sideways so that she slides across the floor just because it is fun. Tom taught her how to fetch and she makes sure he plays fetch every night.

Sneaky Pete

Sneaky Pete had a tough early life. We first saw him in the summer of 2001. He would spend hours watching us from afar, but would not let us get near him. One evening, while Tom was away, I was sitting outside enjoying night coming in. I felt a paw on my thigh and it was Sneaky Pete. I thought it was odd to go from feral to this without any steps in between. I reached down to pat him on the neck. It felt wet and my hand was covered with blood. I scooped him up and brought him in the house. His entire neck had an abrasion as if someone had tried to hang him or drag him with a rope. He had three bleeding wounds that had pellet shot in them. Since he was not feverish and was lucid, I put him in a large crate with no water or food but comfortable bedding for the night. (No food or water in case he needed surgery in the morning. I dropped him off at my veterinarian the next morning (Meriden Animal Hospital) and said that if he was salvageable once they could see all the wounds to go ahead and do surgery. He spent two months with us, happy as a clam. We kept finding him in the house, even though we never let him in. Hence his name, Sneaky Pete. He was so grateful to have a happy home. Somewhere along the way, he decided he like it with us so much that started running our other cats off. Our neighbor has a friend that lives in the country and has a barn full of cats. She was willing to take him. He would get all his shots and treated well, but would not have a home to live in. We gave that a try. She was supposed to integrate him in, but when he got to the barn they just opened the door and let him run off. We found out nine days later that she never saw him after the first night. She lives near a small unincorporated community. It had been over 100 degrees the whole time he was gone. I knew he had watched us for several weeks before trusting us and he knew more people live in housing developments than the country. I figured he had gone to the housing development to look for a new home. I drove to the barn and house where he was deposited and spent over six hours walking around calling him. I walked over 8 miles and probably should have been arrested. I looked under peoples' front porches, in their garages and in their yards. I finally found him in a drainage tube. He was dehydrated. I got him out and carried him a mile back to the car and drove him home. I was sure that Tom would be furious with me, but when he came home that night and saw Sneaky Pete he was all smiles. Life was OK for Petey until 2004. We started to notice that if he got stressed he would bite us, hard. It was not often, only about four times all year. By the fall of 2005, he was bad enough that I talked to the veterinarian about having him put down. In 30 years of owning animals, I could not imagine a scenario where I would have a healthy animal put down. The veterinarian suggested an herbal treatment in the form of a pill. In just three days, he was a different animal. He was silly and happy like he was when we first adopted him. We kept him on the medicine for six months, we now only use it when we know something in our life will cause him stress, such as moving furniture to paint a room. We were able to reintroduce one of the other five cats we have into the house with him. He was reluctant at first, but then started playing. It was as though he didn’t even know how to play with another cat. He had to learn how. Now the two cats race around the house, they stalk each other and play. I think that someone wearing boots used to abuse him. When I leave for work in the morning for my filing job I am wearing sneakers or girl shoes. I can walk right up to Petey and pat him goodbye. If I am wearing my steel toed boots because I am horseshoeing, I can’t find him anywhere in the house. If I change shoes I will find him under the bed or behind the couch and he is scared.