When I was still a teen livin with my parents, we had a cat we brought into the new house. She kept watching the road like a war survivor ready to pounce in and end it all - and she did. After we mourned Flatcat we brought a terror into our lives: the Big One (I'm not using real cat names). So the Big One, female, was horrible soon after we got her but we couldn't just give her back. The house where she was born was gone from the street leaving a vacant lot that the hobo said had been empty for decades. Anyway, Big One eventually got so bad we decided to get a second cat to maybe take the edge off her. Newkitten comes into the house in a cat carrier, set it down, open it up. Newkitten creeps out and comes face to face with the Big One. She opens her maw and hisses directly onto his face, making his eyelids and ears flap. Saunters away leaving Newkitten instantly traumatized. This would be the pattern to his life.
We need to get the cats fixed - Big One was previously indoor and an only cat, so it hadn't been necessary until then. When they came back from the vet, Newcat sat under a chair crying because they cut off his balls, and Big One escaped into an air vent. The vents were exposed in the basement ceiling and you could hear her scratching around in there. Finally, concerned about infection, Mom banged on the vents until Big One exited forcefully and we barred the vent. Big One was filthy, but her incision was not infected and on the plus side she cleaned out the dust from the vents with her meanderings.
Big One once was playing with a fly strip hung from a ceiling hook. Midnight, she comes hollering down the hallway with the strip stuck to her fur, one end at her chin and the whole strip running the length of her belly, up her tail, and the roller part where the strip comes out of hanging off the end of her tail. She was freaked out and super mad, Dad had to corner her to peel it off and she was sticky even after a bath the next day.
Eventually Newcat, harrassed constantly by Big One, died. It is a sad story which I will not now relate. He didn't die because of Big One, at least.
We decided to get a new Newcat, Blackcat. This guy was a runt but he ate large and pretty soon he was humungous. All muscle. Blackcat would chase Big One around the house, finally giving her a comeuppance for her torment of the late Newcat. Her screeching drove us crazy so we eventually relented and let her live in the basement where she grew ancient and powerful. Blackcat would sit by the basement door waiting for an opportunity to scramble down the stairs and poop in her cat box and gobble up all her food. So her life was calmer yet punctuated by excitement.
Blackcat, post-fixing, got saggy in the gut and whined a lot more. But he was still huge. Blackcat would walk along a shelf or mantle and knock things off for fun. Like, he would clear the shelf and move on to the next one. One time he jumped down from the fireplace mantle and broke through a glass tabletop , uninjured, like a damn action hero.
My sister would carry Blackcat around, so he was stretched out across her front with his belly all exposed. She would parade him around and he had this dumb grin on his face the whole time. He wouldn't stand for anyone else picking him up, though, he would fuss too much.
Big One has thus outlived one entire cat and will probably outlive a second. She must be in her teens but I'm not sure.
While Big One has little feline social life - and seems happy about it - Blackcat has regular visits by a posse of other black cats from the neighborhood who come around and chat with him. They actually sit out by the window and make noises and he makes noises back. He used to get out more - in fact, all the cats roamed the roof with access via a sort of dormer window thing - but since he got into the habit of jumping from the roof to the ground we worried that he'd injure himself so the windows have screens now.
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Topic: The Pet Thread - man's best friend (Read 496 times)