Tweet
Mother's cat apparently disappeared three months ago. The family went as far as adopting a new one - we are not a tribe that allows a house to lie cat-free for long, and must furnish our dwellings with felines.
Mother was heartbroken, but risks to cats in their neighborhood, while low, are not zero. As the new trainee was growing accustomed to her job and awaiting the inevitable neutering appointment, the previous occupant returned, wanting her old job back.
Which came as a bit of a shock to my mother.
The real question was where the hell the cat had been for two months. No one is quite sure, but one thing is certain - she wasn't being fed. She looked and felt like a bundle of dry twigs. Father's theory is that she got trapped in someone's basement. As for me, I nearly fell out of my chair when I visited yesterday. This cat was mortifyingly, frighteningly thin. When I picked her up she felt like a rabbit skin wrapped around a bundle of tangled coat hangers. And that was after my parents had been feeding her for a month.
She had a trip to the vet - to everyone's shock and delight, her starvation hasn't affected her kidneys or liver, she's just shockingly thin, almost frightening to look at. Apparently she doesn't even need any changes in her diet content - just to ensure that whatever she eats, she gets a LOT of it. (Mother fed her quite a bit of turkey yesterday.) They also have a fourth cat in the house, a massive Bluto of a cat, a thirty-six pound blob of kitty putty that's extremely possessive of any food in the house, who has spent the last months locked upstairs so that the cat can have all she wants and first pickin's.
This was also the first time one of our pets actually met her replacement. Fortunately, they get along well. They have something of an excess of cats in that house, but no one minds. They have the resources to handle all four.
Cats are resilient.
Love, Who?
Mother was heartbroken, but risks to cats in their neighborhood, while low, are not zero. As the new trainee was growing accustomed to her job and awaiting the inevitable neutering appointment, the previous occupant returned, wanting her old job back.
Which came as a bit of a shock to my mother.
The real question was where the hell the cat had been for two months. No one is quite sure, but one thing is certain - she wasn't being fed. She looked and felt like a bundle of dry twigs. Father's theory is that she got trapped in someone's basement. As for me, I nearly fell out of my chair when I visited yesterday. This cat was mortifyingly, frighteningly thin. When I picked her up she felt like a rabbit skin wrapped around a bundle of tangled coat hangers. And that was after my parents had been feeding her for a month.
She had a trip to the vet - to everyone's shock and delight, her starvation hasn't affected her kidneys or liver, she's just shockingly thin, almost frightening to look at. Apparently she doesn't even need any changes in her diet content - just to ensure that whatever she eats, she gets a LOT of it. (Mother fed her quite a bit of turkey yesterday.) They also have a fourth cat in the house, a massive Bluto of a cat, a thirty-six pound blob of kitty putty that's extremely possessive of any food in the house, who has spent the last months locked upstairs so that the cat can have all she wants and first pickin's.
This was also the first time one of our pets actually met her replacement. Fortunately, they get along well. They have something of an excess of cats in that house, but no one minds. They have the resources to handle all four.
Cats are resilient.
Love, Who?
He likes to have someone stand and watch him eat. He'll meow at someone until they follow him to his bowl, thinking he needs a refill...but no, he just wants an audience. 
Comment