What this blog is…

and what it isn’t.

If you are new to my Blog, please read this before you get upset with me. Any angry comments that do not acknowledge this post will not be approved.

The Ultimate Success Story

So when we left off, I was pretty sure Gustav’s clock was ticking. I worried all week that he wouldn’t be there when I went in next. The shelter has a don’t ask don’t tell policy with its volunteers, if you come in and one of your cats is gone, and you’re worried it might have been ethionine, you can ask, but if you don’t want to know, don’t ask and the staff won’t tell you.

Fortunately however, he was still there, or should I say, there again. He’d been sent back to the main shelter, because he was clearly not adoptable in his current condition, but the staff there decided to give him one last chance, and figured he’d have the best chance at the adoption center because the cats there get more one on one time. So he took up residence in the back room, which we reserve for cats who don’t do well in the colony, but don’t do well in a kennel either. I wish we had half a dozen back rooms. I could tell that even after only one week he was doing much better. His episodes were fewer and further between and it took him less time to calm down afterword.

I call them episodes now because clearly there was something more going on here than him just being an over active cat. He is not in control of himself during these episodes. At first I thought that it was merely overstimulation, but I’m beginning to think it might be a stress reaction. There is so much nose… doors opening and closing, the washer and drier, fans, people talking, water running, other cats meowing, hissing, growling. I started to notice how he seemed to jump at these sounds, and the other day I caught him staring at the fan with a certain amount of contempt.

By the end of that second day with him, it was still not safe to play with him. If you waved a toy in front of him, he would become fixated on your hand instead of the toy. But when he was calm he was the sweetest thing ever. He curled up in my lap that day and snuggled up against me. I quickly learned not to wrap my arm around in front of him, this was a trigger for him and still is, but as long as I didn’t do that he was fine. I sat there for nearly an hour that day with him asleep in my lap, and hoped beyond hope that he wouldn’t bite someone bad enough to get himself ethionine before we could uncover his true potential.

The next day I looked at the shelters website, and he was listed, I took this as good news because it meant someone felt that he was actually adoptable. When I looked at the site the next day how ever, he was gone. I knew this was either very good, or very bad… I turns out that reality was somewhere in between.

The next week when I went in there was good news! Gustav had been adopted! Cheers all around!

However on the way to the adoption center the next week I had this sudden feeling that Gustav would be back, and I was right. Apparently who ever adopted him out had allowed him to be adopted to someone with other cats, something that was clearly not a good idea. But he was alive, and making steady progress, and that was what mattered.

Over the next several weeks he became a fixture at the center and in all of our hearts. In the morning while we were cleaning, before we opened, we would let him out of the back room and into the lobby. As soon as we opened the door he would come flying out of the back room like a rocket, and tear around getting some of his extra energy out. His favorite things to do during this time are, chasing the broom, hiding behind the rolled up rug, eating food out of the bowls that are set out to give the other cats (we’ve tried giving him his own bowl but he won’t have nothing to do with it) and using the clean litter boxes that are waiting to go into the colony. Oh, he also likes tormenting the cats that are in the kennels, although he’s knows better now it is still so hard for him to resist.

The first couple of weeks he enjoyed his nap time in my lap, but after a while he stopped. He came to see me as an authority figure, but that was ok, he wasn’t my cat. Some of my trainings included offering him my hand, if he tried to bite it, I’d take it away, if he didn’t try to bite it he got chin and ear scratches, which he loved. it didn’t take long before he stopped trying to bite my hand. I taught him early on, that if something was in my hand, it was mine and he couldn’t play with it. At first if he was wound up he couldn’t resist but after a while I could actually take a toy he was actively plying with, hold it in front of him in my clenched fist, with it poking out so he could see that it was there, and he would either sit there looking at it, waiting for me to give it back, or he would go find something else to play with. How may cats can resist that much temptation! He also knows that when I offer him something, holding it out to him with the tips of my fingers, I am giving it to him and he can take it gently.

After writing up that first entry about him the other day, and thinking about how far he’s come, I can hardly believe it.

We’ve even been able to put him in with certain cats. So far we’ve only been able to put him with confidant, calm, males who aren’t afraid of him but won’t put up with any of his guff. These cats have taught him things about boundaries that we would never be able to.

We still have to be careful, as he can still get too wound up and go into attack mode, but it went from being every thirty seconds, to being a couple times a day, to being once a day, to being once in a great while. And what’s more! Two weeks ago he curled up in my lap for the first time in months! Which means he’s started for forgive me for all that work I put him though.

This week I tried starting to desensitize him to his one remaining trigger, the arm in front of him. I used the same method as I did with my hand. I’m not sure how much progress I made though, because once he realized I was “training” him he got upset with me and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I also wanted to see how he would react if I laid down on the floor. (I had this sudden fear that he would attack his future owner(s) in their sleep.) This didn’t seem to set him off at all though. At first he just seemed curious as to why my shoes were in the air. (I was laying on my stomach, with my legs bent up at the knees, because the room isn’t very big.) He looked and looked, and then he got up on the wheeled cat in the room and stood up on his hind legs and looked… and then he came up and curled up next to me.

He’s calmed down a lot, partly because of our work, and partly because he’s growing up. He was only around nine months old when he came in, but he’s over a year now, and starting to settle into adulthood.

He is also going home soon. One of the volunteers is away on vacation right now and when they get back, if Gustav hasn’t been adopted he is going to adopt him. This is probably one of the best endings we could have hoped for, he’ll be going home with someone who is experienced with cats and who is already familiar with Gustav and all of his quirks, and who will give us updates.

But I can’t help feeling a little sad. I’m going to miss that silly Goose, we all are.

An aside

This is one of those posts that will have to link directly to my general disclaimer I’m afraid, please read it before continuing.

I will return to Gustav’s story shortly, but in the meantime I’d like to talk about some of the terms I will used in this blog, and the differences I see in various cats termed “feral”

What follows is all theory that I have developed from my personal experience, and should not be taken as fact.

The most common type of feral cat encountered in the shelter system is that I call an “Unsocialized house cat”. This is a cat with parents who were born as house cats, but who has had little or no contact with humans during their life time. They may be wild and frightened at first, but they can be tamed.

In my lifetime I’ve had more experience with what I would term a truly feral cat, this is a cat who comes from generations of feral cats, and though natural selection has developed traits and instincts not normally seen in house cats. They are most commonly found in rural areas, mostly barn cats (although not all barn cats are feral) but can also be found living in the wilderness. A truly feral adult can, in my theory, never be fully tamed, and can only become what I would call semi feral, a cat that is not afraid of humans, but doesn’t fully trust them either. A kitten born from truly feral parents can be tamed, but will likely always have some of the traits of his feral heritage. They aren’t likely to be lap cats or enjoy lavish attention.

When I was a kid I had a theory that domestic cats could be divided into three subspecies. House cats, barn cats and feral cats (and yes I used the term feral). House cats is pretty self explanatory. Barn cats, I felt, had been developing for so long in the farm environment that they had developed certain traits, although not entire unique to barn cats, they were present in all barn cats. These were both behavioral and physical traits.

Behavioral traits: The barn cats behavioural traits are the same as any truly feral cat. From birth, they have an instinctual fear of unknown things, a fear and instinct necessary to their survival. The first time a house cats kittens see a human they will approach it, but the first time a barn cat kitten sees a human, or other wise senses its presence if its eyes are still closed, it will puff up, hiss, spit and do anything it can to attempt to scare it away. But because of their consistent exposure to humans, they often become semi-feral. I see feral, semi-feral and fully tame as a spectrum, one I will cover in more detail, including specific examples at a later date.

The physical traits: Females were thin, even when raised as a house cat and provided with an unlimited food supply, they would always remain thin. The advantage of this trait was that they would require less food to sustain themselves. all though being smaller than the average house cat, they were tall, when you compare their length to their body mass. Males are slightly larger than females, and more muscular. Both males and females have fairly large ears and long tails, for improved balance and hearing, these facilitated their hunting abilities, the key element to their symbiotic relationship with farmers. It was this symbiotic relationship, which has existed for more than a hundred years, that spurned on these evolutionary changes. The farmers provided the cats with shelter, warmth and supplementary food and the cats kept the barns free of mice and rats.

Barn cats also have a unique social structure. More like a lion pride than a tiger. Our colony, when I was growing up, consisted of one alpha male and multiple females. I actually found a book on this phenomena once, but can no longer remember the tile. I find myself once again tempted to diverge from the subject at hand and talk in more detail about the behavior of our colony, but I will have to save that for another time.

From a young age I have felt that barn cats are a separate entity from the average domestic cat, and should be respected as such, a controversial belief among cat lovers to be sure, and a belief that has begun to change, largely because the barn cats habitat has begun to disappear. As the family farm becomes extinct, so will the barn cat, which is something that saddens me.

I will go into more detail about barn cats, including ethics, at a later date.

Feral cats, as I defined them, were once domestic cats, but have reverted to truly wild animals. They are rare, how rare I couldn’t tell you because they are nearly impossible to spot, and I have only heard about them, never actually seen one. My theory, based on what I felt would best facilitate their survive, was that they are small, shorter than barn cats, but muscular and strong. This way they require less food than the average house cat, but are strong enough to take down larger prey, such as squirrels and rabbits. of course this is purely theory and has no basis in actually experience or fact.

The Trouble with Gustav

(That’s a lame attempt at a Star Trek reference by the way)

It’s past time I tell you about Gustav, or as we’ve taken to calling him, Goose. I’ve been putting off updating because I wanted to start out talking about Gustav and didn’t really know where to start. About two months ago I had it all planned out… Week one he did this, we did that; week two… etc., but That’s gone out the window as the weeks have started to blend together now, so I’ll just start out and see where it goes.

Gustav first came to the adoption center when he was nine months old. He was, without exaggeration, one of the most handsome cats I have ever seen. He is mostly white with patches of orange tabby markings on his head, tail and a couple on his body. His orange is a perfect deep orange and his white is so pure that it actually glistens. And its more than just that, he’s lean and muscular and carries himself with an air of confidence. It was almost impossible for anyone to see him and not instantly fall in love with him, which, sadly, but also thankfully is probably part of the reason he is still here today.

About thirty seconds after you fell in love with him, you would discover the trouble.

You see, Gustav spent most of his life in isolation, between bite quarantine and Upper Respiratory Tract infection (euphuistically called a “kitty cold”). He had no interaction with other cats and not nearly enough interaction with people. The staff person I work with uses him as an example of why kittens either need another kitten to play with or almost constant human interaction.

Gustav plays like a kitten, but the problem is that he is a large, full grown and very powerful adult cat. You can see where this might be a problem. If by some chance you haven’t seen kittens play with each other, I can assure you it is not an gentle ordeal. When kittens play, it isn’t just a game, they are learning how to fight, how to protect themselves, how to catch (an kill) prey, but they’re also learning boundaries. If they don’t get to play as a kitten they never learn when to stop; they never learn what means no.

Gustav played with every ounce of manic-ness that kittens play with each other, and he didn’t know when to stop. In fact, he would get so carried away that once you managed to wrestle your arm, or what ever part of your body he was playing with, away from him, he would begin attacking his own hind leg, every bit as violently and with every bit of force that he had been attacking you just moments ago.

When I first met Gustav, I was wondering who exactly was the genius who sent him to the adoption center, he wasn’t in the least bit adoptable. But he wasn’t irredeemable.

There was some debate over whether he was aggressive or not. It didn’t take us long to figure out that he wasn’t. He never hissed, never growled, his body posture didn’t seem territorial or angry, he just looked like a giant kitten. The advantage of this was that he could be restrained. If you try to restrain an aggressive cat you’re only going to make things worse, but with Gustav, it had the opposite affect. I quickly discovered that when he “attacked” I could scruff him,* pin him down “making sure to keep my harms and hands away from his teeth and claws, and he would calm down. I also discovered that massaging the scruff of his neck had a calming affect on him. once he was calm he was completely docile… until something moved in his range of vision and set him off again. At one point I had him calm and another volunteer came into the room and he promptly latched himself to her leg.

Nonetheless, by the end of that first day I knew that he was not a lost cause, but he needed time, and I wasn’t sure that time was something he had.

(Please note that I did not take these pictures. They are from the shelter’s website and had no credit attached to them. I absolutely love them though, and could not resist including them here.)

*You should never lift a cat by the scruff of the neck the way a mother cat lifts her kittens; adult cats weigh a lot more than kittens, but gripping a cat by the scruff of the neck can be a good way to subdue them as a cat who is gripped that way is unlikely to struggle.

Who Can Resist Cute Kittens?

I’ve been putting off starting this blog because I wanted to start out with an article about my current pet project (no pun intended) Gustav, but instead I’ll post some pictures I took today of the kittens. We had four kittens today; Ritia, Willow, Secret and Daisy. Ritia, Willow and Secret were litter mates and Daisy was the odd one out. She came from a litter who’s mom was unable to feed them and they were all stunted size wise, her siblings weren’t old enough to be spayed and neutered yet so they are still in foster care. All four of the kittens were around three months old, and even though Daisy is noticeably smaller than the others she is actually a little older.

The picture quality isn’t the best, because I didn’t want to use flash and it wasn’t quite bright enough.

Ritia (bottom) and Secret (top) have a nap.

Won’t somebody give me a snuggle? Daisy was feeling a little scared and alone, so I dropped her in with the other napping kittens and she settled right in.

Daisy fell asleep on top and woke up to find herself on the bottom, she’s looking at Willow and wondering what happened. Ritia on the seems undisturbed.

Daisy and Ritia have a little smooch.

Here’s a few more, mostly of Daisy, Willow and Ritia.