Petz

[dseagrav]

Presently, I have a cat. One way or another, she will be my last cat. If I survive long enough to get a kidney transplant, the immunosuppressants I will have to take for the rest of my life make handling cat litter an "unacceptable" infection risk. Until then, the transplant office would really rather I give her up immediately rather than wait, but they can't legally force me to. So I won't.

We had a few dogs growing up, and number of cats. This was because we lived near woods and cornfields. If you did not have a cat, you had mice. The cats were much better housemates than the mice.

After growing up and moving out, I had four cats that were mine, all rescued after being abandoned. I named all of my cats for puns on the word "cat", because I am a terrible person.

First there were Bob Cat and Tom Cat. They were brothers, both tabby. Bob was yellow-ish tabby and Tom was dark-ish tabby. They were born to serve as bait for the training of attack dogs. From this Bob had a brain injury and was only able to turn left. (This condition led to us giving him the nickname "NASCAT"; he ran fast and made left turns all day.) They were abandoned when the degenerates they lived with received a tip-off that their meth lab was about to be raided by law enforcement. They survived on mice and other critters for several months before they were found and rescued by myself and a friend. They both lived long and happy lives from that point forward, passing on of old age about a year apart.

A few years after their rescue, someone abandoned a very young black kitten in a taped-up box near my sister's apartment. She already had a cat, and Mom had two puppies, so I wound up with him. He was so small that the first night in my care he curled up and slept inside a CD-ROM spindle cover. Since he was identical to my sister's cat, he was deemed the Dupli Cat, or "Dupe" for short. He became very attached to my then roommate, and moved away with him when he moved out. Last I heard he was still alive and doing well, but he is very advanced in age by now.

A few years again after Dupe and my roommate moved away, someone abandoned a tabby kitten out in the cornfields. Freezing in the cold, she climbed up into the engine bay of an HVAC repair truck making a service call nearby. She was found a few miles down the highway, when the driver slowed down to determine the source of the strange noise he was hearing and recognized it as a kitten's cry. She was huddled up on the front transfer case, whiskers curled from the engine heat. Nobody at the HVAC company could keep her, so she was left to roam the area of the office block, which is where I found her when I arrived for work the next morning. She was cleaned up and taken home to meet Tom and Bob, whom she immediately started bossing around as if she owned the place. This earned her the name "Aeris The Cat", which sounds like "Aristocrat" when said aloud (kinda pushing the cat pun thing on that one...)

Besides the cats, at other points I have had a wild mourning-dove (shot with a BB gun, released when recovered; not the best roommate), a rabbit (mean and onery critter, bit and scratched anyone close enough so nobody else wanted him), an albino rat (bought as snake food, snake didn't eat her, and the owner didn't want to leave her in the tank for fear of her harming the snake), and a ferret (to be abandoned in a closing pet shop because nobody else wanted to buy the runt, so I did). The problem with the smaller animals is that they basically live just long enough for you to become attached to them and then they die. I don't plan to own another, but I'm a sucker for poor animals down on their luck.