Day 298 - Herding Cats

Marmelade and the peacock
on the balcony

Violet was not our only cat in Abu Dhabi. It wasn't our desire to add more cats to our family. And Violet wasn't thrilled about sharing the space with other cats, either. But we really didn't have a choice. And it was all Violet's fault!

Violet was a small long-haired adult female cat who wouldn't take "no" for an answer, but she was happy to hand that answer out.

For example, Violet got what she wanted by refusing what we offered. She wouldn't eat dry food, so we had to buy canned food. But she also wouldn't eat anything from a can that had been opened before. If the food was cold, she wouldn't eat it. I tried warming it up in the microwave, but that didn't fool her. Unless her food was freshly dispensed from a new can, she wouldn't have it. Since Fancy Feast didn't appear on the grocery store shelves very often in Abu Dhabi, we had to buy big cans of cat food from which Violet would eat one large spoonful, leaving us with leftover cat food - leftover smelly cat food - every day.

We tried just throwing the cans away with our trash. But if we didn't put the trash out just as it was being collected, the feral cats in the neighborhood would dig through the bags, spreading our garbage evereywhere. And whose fault was it? Violet's.

Next we decided we would use the leftover food to feed selected feral cats since they were going to get the food anyway. We noticed a beautiful gray cat that Alex named Mosby, for John S. Mosby, the Confederate cavalryman of the Civil War referred to as the Gray Ghost. Mosby used to follow us along the sidewalk as we walked to visit neighbors. He didn't seem all that wild, so we fed Mosby, until he disappeared.

There were so many feral cats in Abu Dhabi that the city made the rounds at night collecting them. The only cats they didn't collect were those wearing collars or those that had been collected previously by an organization that paid to have them neutered and then resettled them in colonies where they also fed them. To make those cats identifiable, a small nick was cut in the side of one of their ears. Mosby did not have a nick in either of his ears. So he disappeared. But we didn't know the importance of the nick in the ear at that point.

We saw a couple of kittens that also took to following us along the sidewalk. We thought they looked like good prospects for eating up the food Violet wouldn't eat. We began feeding them at the front of the house each morning, but it didn't take too long for the larger cats to begin attacking the kittens to get at the food. One morning we were awakened by cat fight noises at the front door. That was the clue that we were going to have to let the kittens into the house.

Now Violet had companions, though very much unwelcome ones.

Marmelade and Fudge

The two kittens were both males. One was an orange and white tabby and the other completely orange, with a misshapen tail. The orange and white kitten ended up with the name Fudge. The all orange one, Marmelade. While it was clear the two were on their own, Fudge didn't have the characteristic wildness of a feral cat. He settled down right away as a domestic cat. Marmelade on the other hand was not comfortable around people. Fudge would climb into my lap. Marmelade wouldn't let me get near him unless he was eating and I approached him from behind. Then I could grab him around his belly and move him somewhere else. But that didn't make him willing to put up with any human attention.

Marmelade also had his own jealousies over food. He used to position himself in front of both his and Fudge's food dishes so that Fudge would have to wait to eat, that is if Marmelade left anything for him. Sometimes I had to pick him up and move him into a bathroom where I could close the door to keep him in so Fudge could eat.

The day after Fudge and Marmelade moved in, we realized they had a sister. She was a calico with exactly the same face as the boys. She started hanging around our house, but we just couldn't let one more kitten move into our space. Instead, we started feeding her at the back door, just outside the kitchen.

And Violet? She wouldn't allow the boys near her food dish. When the boys moved in, she was still considerably larger than they were, so she was effective at blocking their access to their food. I tried putting her dish at the other side of the kitchen, but she just parked herself at the entrance to the kitchen and kept the boys out, so we resorted to putting Violet's food on the top floor of the house. That kept two floors between her and the boys. So at this point, we were putting one dish on the third floor, two in the kitchen, and one in the back yard.

The cats at nap time

Meanwhile, Missy had kittens, one male and one female. Two more dishes in the back yard at feeding time. The kittens got pretty independent, and then the female disappeared. Maybe she just wandered to a new area. We still didn't know about the organization that collected feral cats and had them neutered. We just knew she disappeared. The male cat, Eddy, stopped spending much time in the back of our house, although we saw him now and then.

With time, Marmelade warmed up to us and began hanging around with us, even more than Fudge. He used to jump up on the sofa and then push his body right up to mine, not leaving a space between us big enough to slip a piece of paper into. By then, all three of the cats spent the nights on our bed. Well, sort of. Violet still didn't want to see the boys, so she slept under the duvet. The boys slept wherever they wanted to.

A few months later, Missy had a second litter of kittens, four cats, two calicos and two tabbies. Eddy started coming around much more often after the kittens were born and often managed to suckle from Missy along side his siblings. Four more dishes in the back yard.

Missy in front with her kittens at dinner time,
with Fudge wearing his collar at the right

Fudge and Marmelade weren't happy staying indoors all of time, so we tried to keep collars on them. But they would work themselves out of them while they were outside. One night, Marmelade didn't come home. He didn't show up the next day either. The vet confirmed our worst fears - Marmelade got caught up in a feral cat sweep. That is when we learned about the nick in the ear being a mark that cats had been neutered. The vet didn't think we would want the nick in the ears of Fudge and Marmelade when he fixed them because they were our cats, not cats on the street. If only the boys had kept their collars on.

Once Missy's second batch of kittens were no longer nursing, we brought her to the vet for some fixing and this time we insisted her ear be nicked. The kittens might not need her much longer, but we didn't want her to disappear, too. The nick on Missy's ear was so small it was almost invisible.

One day after Marmelade's disappearance, I was at the vet's when I noticed a kitten that looked just like Fudge in a pen in the waiting room. He had been picked out by someone and then returned when the prospective owner realized she couldn't take him back to the U.S. with her. He just had to come home with me. Alex named him RF for Rocket Fuel because he ran around the house so fast. When I took him in to be neutered, I insisted that his ear be nicked so we wouldn't have to worry about losing him. But instead of the tiny nick like the one in Missy's ear, RF's ear looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. RF's arrival brought us back to three indoor cats and five - and sometimes six, when Eddy came around - outdoor cats.

And that's how we herded cats in Abu Dhabi.

Day 223 - Mongooses and Centipedes

Image of a mongoose by Colin
the Scot, via Flickr.com

Barbados did not have any snakes. That was a good thing. The reason there were no snakes is that there were mongooses. The mongooses are not native to Barbados. They were introduced to tackle the rat and snake populations. They were very effective against snakes. There are none left. They weren't so effective against rats. They could be seen on the main streets downtown on any day.

But as seems always to happen, the imported species ended up doing some damage to the native animal population. For that reason, Barbados and other Caribbean islands banned the importation of mongooses some time after gaining independence. I learned about this during a visa interview when I asked a woman how old her daughter was. She answered, "She was born in the year they stopped the mongoose from Barbados."

Because there are few obvious changes in the seasons in the Caribbean, people seemed to have difficulty keeping track of the passage of time. Someone might describe a family as having just moved in when in fact they had been living there five years or more. Thus, events were good markers, even if they didn't easily translate into years for us tourists.

Sharifa was the only one of us who ended up encountering a mongoose. The mongoose's claws are not retractable, making them very effective weapons. We don't think Sharifa decided to attack the mongoose. We prefer to think she was trying to make friends. But the mongoose had other ideas and sent Sharifa back into the house where she raced behind our sofa to hide.

Our next door neighbor, Alan, was a veterinarian. His clinic was on the lower floor of their house. Sharifa was very fortunate for our proximity to Alan's clinic as we could get her to him before she went into shock.

Barbados did have a pest that we weren't so fortunate to avoid - centipedes. They were big and fast and

image of a centipede by Janielle Beh, via Flickr.com

persistent. They had migratory patterns that took them right through homes as former sugar cane fields were cut down and the land developed as new housing estates. Since we were the first residents of our house, the centipedes that found it in their way just came on in.

We asked neighbors who had been in the area longer if they had problems with centipedes, and they all said they had in the past. But they told us not to worry. Eventually they would stop coming. When we asked how long they would keep coming, they said about 3 to 5 years. We expected to be in Barbados 4 years, so that wasn't good news for us,

Sharifa was also the one who had the closest encounter with a centipede. We had invited a few friends for dinner one evening, including Alan, the vet from next door, and his wife, as well as a woman from the Canadian High Commission and a couple of colleagues from the U.S. embassy. I served paella which had large shrimp in it. So when Sheikha kept wandering around under the table meowing, I assumed she was begging for shrimp. Sharifa wasn't with her.

As the evening drew to a close and our visitors left, we headed upstairs and found a very large centipede on the wall of the living room. Alex grabbed a shoe and got rid of it, watching out carefully for the centipede's ability to raise up the front half of its body and flip backwards to inject its venom on a threatening hand. With the centipede dispatched, we headed up to bed and didn't think any more about it.

In the morning, when I went downstairs and announced, "Food," for the cats, only Sheikha came running. That was unusual, so I went looking for Sharifa. I found her sitting on a chair in the living room, not moving much. I noticed right away that her neck was swollen. She looked more like a rabbit with short ears than a cat.

image of tarantula by hankplank, via Flickr.com

We rushed her next door to Alan's clinic. He recognized right away that she had been bitten by a centipede. Sharifa stayed with Alan for a couple of days until he was sure the centipede venom had worked its way through her system.

Thankfully, there were no tarantulas on Barbados. But there were on St. Lucia where Alex worked for a year. . .

Day 206 - Sheikha and Sharifa

Sheikha

Once I met Alex, we decided we needed something to make my house more like home. We decided a cat would do. Alex knew someone who had a cat that had just given birth to kittens, so we picked one out - an all black female half-Siamese we named Sheikha, the feminine form of Sheikh, a common title in Arab countries.

Sheikha moved in with us and settled nicely. For a few weeks, that is.

Three weeks later, I was out shopping with Gloria, the ambassador's secretary. When we returned, there was an orange crate on Gloria's steps. An unexplained package on a doorstep set off alarms in both of us, but we stopped worrying when we saw a small white paw sticking through one of the holes in the top. When we got to Gloria's door, we saw a tiny white desert cat in the crate. Since Gloria already had two adult cats, she said she couldn't take in the kitten. I took her home. We named her Sharifa, the feminine form of Sharif, another Arab title.

Sharifa in a box

We learned later that the guards at the entrance to our housing compound had been taking care of Sharifa.  Housing compounds were frequent dumping grounds for litters of kittens, although Sharifa didn't look like other cats. We called her a desert cat because her head was very small, her ears were too large for her head, and her rear haunches were huge. When she ran, her back legs got ahead of her front legs. When the guards realized they couldn't continue taking care of the kitten, they asked some of the boys on the compound to find a new home for her. One of the boys was PJ, son of my embassy colleague Pete. Whether they asked anyone else on the compound I don't know. But it wasn't a surprise they concluded Gloria would take in another cat since she already had two.

Sheikha and Sharifa with one of their toys - a rubber band

Sheikha wasn't pleased to have to share her space with Sharifa, but Sharifa was determined. Sheikha would try to keep her distance from Sharifa, but Sharifa would would prance right over to Sheikha and jump on top of her. Sheikha was bigger, but Sharifa always came out on top.

There were a few other reasons we considered Sharifa a desert cat. She seemed to create her own toys out of whatever she found. And what she seemed to prefer were raisin-shaped, dried up turds which she batted all around the house as if she were dribbling a soccer ball. When we found them, we threw them away, naturally. So she started hiding them under the throw rug in the kitchen. But the silly cat didn't catch on that when she took them out to play while we were home, we could hear her toys rolling around on the tile floor in the kitchen. And we threw them away again.

Sharifa leaping higher than her height

She was also incredibly athletic. In contrast, Sheikha seemed lazy, satisfied to sit in a corner and wait for entertainment to come her way. Sharifa, on the other had, had those huge haunches so she could leap into the air to catch bugs or whatever we tossed up to catch her attention. A helium-filled balloon with a film box tied as ballast so that the balloon wouldn't just rise to and rest on the ceiling was hours of entertainment for both Sharifa and anyone else in the room with her.

When we left Doha, we had to send Sheikha and Sharifa to England since Barbados, my next assignment, required dogs and cats spend six months in quarantine in England before they could be imported into Barbados. We sent them off to England as kittens and collected them six months later as cats.

Day 161 - Cats and Dogs

Bunk

I am not really a dog person. I prefer cats. I am allergic to both, but I am somehow less bothered by cat allergies than dog allergies. When I discovered the allergies, I went through desensitization treatment, aka shots, which may explain why I am not so bothered by cats. It can't just be that I like them more than I like dogs.

In spite of my preference for cats, I have recently become somewhat attached to Bunk, Simon and Sarah's boxer. Bunk stayed with us for a week, while both Simon and Sarah were in Ohio. Bunk is such a placid animal, spending most of his time looking for just the right amount of sun or just the right amount of cool tile to lie down comfortably.

I have shared my life with lots of cats. There was Bilbo Baggins, aka Cat, and Karley, aka Kitty, in California. There was Sheikha and then Sharifa in Doha. The two of them made the trip to Barbados to join us and later Pooky joined the family. We lost Sharifa there. She went through all nine of her lives. And when we left for Moldova, we had to find new homes for Sheikha and Pooky because we knew we would be living in a hotel room at least initially. Sheikha stayed behind in Barbados and Pooky went with a

Sheikha

colleague to Iceland.

At that point, I agreed with Alex that we would have no more cats because it was just too hard to let go. But when we were about to leave for Abu Dhabi, a friend who was just about to leave asked if would take their cat, Violet, because they couldn't take her with them. And that opened the door for Fudge, Marmelade, RF, Missy, Eddie, and Missy's six kittens to move in on us. Missy, Eddie, and the kittens never really moved in, but they settled down quite permanently in our back yard where I fed them twice a day.

It was all Violet's fault. She was such a fussy eater. She would only eat from a freshly opened can of food. If the can had been in the refrigerator, Violet wouldn't touch its contents. And they didn't sell small cans of food in Abu Dhabi. She also wouldn't eat dry food, or Tender Vittles. So we ended up with large cans of cat food that Violet wouldn't touch.

Sharifa

 When we threw the cans away, the feral cats in the neighborhood dumped over our cans and ripped apart all the bags to get at the cat food.

That is when we decided we had to pick out a cat or two to feed in order to avoid the cat fights on our front porch. Fudge and Marmelade were just kittens. Fudge was very friendly, so he is the one we decided to feed. The plan was to keep feeding them outside, but they were so small and the bigger cats in the neighborhood harrassed them, loudly, leaving us with one good option - letting them move in for the sake of our sanity.

Violet wasn't happy. She wouldn't share the kitchen with them. She parked herself in the doorway and wouldn't let the two of them pass. So we had to put her food on the top floor to separate them so Fudge and Marmelade could eat in the kitchen.

Fudge and Marmelade

And that is when we noticed Missy, a calico we were pretty certain was their sister. She started hanging around in the back yard, so we would feed her, too. She had two kittens, a male and a female. The female disappeared, but the male, Eddie, kept coming back. In a few months he was bigger than any of the others, twice the size of either Fudge or Marmelade. And Missy had her second litter, this time six kittens. Eddie would settle down among the kittens and suckle from Missy along with his siblings.

Marmelade disappeared after a few weeks. That is when RF appeared. He was a miniature copy of Fudge, so there was no question he would join the family.

We had to leave them all behind in Abu Dhabi.

Bishop

Once again, we agreed no more cats. But we hadn't counted on Bishop appearing. Simon came to live with us and he also loved cats. He was especially interested in getting a black and white cat. He had a name already picked out - Hagrid. But on a stroll through a pet store one Sunday, he saw Bishop. And since Bishop was Simon's nickname where he worked in England before he moved to Virginia, once again, it was clear that there was yet another cat destined for our family.

Bishop, and for a shorter time his sister Ginnie, lived with us for 10 years. But when Alex and I left Virginia for California, Bishop stayed behind with our next door neighbor Carol.

This time there will be no more cats.

And no dogs either.

Day 122 - Velveteen Kitty

Velveteen Kitty

Velveteen Kitty is the gentlest of creatures. When he wants some petting, he raises his paw to catch the attention of the nearest humor. If the humans aren't observant enough, he'll tap his paw ever so gently against a leg, arm, hand or even cheek. He is insistent, but not aggressive. No one can ignore his gentle taps. But even when he is invited to jump into a lap, he waits to be sure his presence isn't an intrusion. He is the gentlest of creatures.

Life could have been so different for him if he hadn't found Lori. Of course, Lori thinks she found him when she spied him in the cardboard box of free kittens. He was the runt of the litter. His fur was absolutely totally and completely unruly, sticking out in every possible direction, making him look more like Gizmo from the movie The Gremlins than a kitten. Lori's family had just lost a cat so her eyes locked onto Velveteen Kitty's eyes and it was destiny that he should go home with her.

He was so small then. But now his body has grown into the mass of fur that surrounded his kitten body, giving him an almost regal look. The thick fur poses challenges. Between the hairs he shed and the hair balls he coughed up, Lori had had enough. She took Velveteen Kitty to be groomed. He gets a lion cut so that his head and tail retain evidence of the thickness of his fur while the rest of his body is as smooth and soft as velveteen. Velveteen Kitty does have one drawback: he drools. When he has finally been convinced to sit in my lap, his head goes under my hand wherever it is - on the keyboard of the laptop, on my book - and while he gets my attention, he drools. But I don't mind.

Mas

Velveteen Kitty shares his human home with a few other animals. There is Lily, the almost entirely orange tabby who seems to forget who Velveteen Kitty is for a few days after he gets his new lion cut. During those days, Lily hisses and spits at Velveteen Kitty, giving the impression that she is pretty tough. But in fact, Lily runs at the sight of her own shadow and hides in back rooms when the house has more people in it than she is prepared to share it with.

There are also the two dogs, Max and Kirby, each one barely Velveteen Kitty's size. The dogs ignore both cats most of the time, concentrating all their energy on making sure the joggers, walkers, dog-walkers, runners, and occasional drivers who make their way down the street in front of Lori's house keep away. Their barks are ferocious, although their size makes it easy to overlook them, especially during the winter when they blend into the snow that covers the yard.

Day 37 - Cats

My first husband and I received many wedding gifts, but one was very special: an orange tabby cat we named Bilbo Baggins, but we always called Cat. Cat was a gift from my friend Cathy and her boyfriend David. Cathy's mother tried to talk her out of giving us a live gift, but Cathy persisted, and we were very grateful for what Cat brought to our lives. But four months later, we moved to California and knew we would have to find an apartment there.

Image by vincent chen, via Flickr

We had prepared Cat for the move. On our way out of Minnesota, we stayed with Don's parents for a week. His parents arranged for Cat to stay at a cat kennel during that stay. While there, Cat was "fixed" and got all his shots so we would have a current health certificate when we entered California. Along the way, we learned that not all motels were happy to have cats in their rooms. Many just tolerated animals and required an extra fee. So when we got to Berkeley, we knew it was going to be a challenge to find a place where we could keep Cat.

After two nights in a motel, we knew we had to find an apartment fast because we didn't have a lot of spare cash. When we found one that was furnished and only required first months' rent, plus a modest cleaning deposit, we had just enough for it, but they didn't allow animals. The explanation from the manager was that animals brought fleas into the building. Well that's not what I had heard. I had heard it was dirty people living in dirty houses who brought fleas into their homes, so I was initially insulted that the manager would think I wouldn't keep the apartment clean. But indignation would not pay the rent.

We took Cat to the Humane Society. More precisely, we drove to the Humane Society and Don brought Cat into the building. When he came back out, he told me the people inside were sure they could find a new home for Cat because he was still a kitten and so very cute. I chose to believe Don, although I had many reasons to be suspicious.

Later that day, we moved into our apartment, without Cat. And I cried and cried.

Image by fatedsnowfox, via Flickr

The next day was a Saturday. Don had spent some time on the UC Berkeley campus earlier in the week and he found information about a free movie playing that afternoon. We went. It was Born Free about Elsa, the lion. What a miserable choice for the day after giving away our cat. I spent more time crying that evening.

As soon as we could, we moved out of that apartment that didn't allow animals so we could get another cat. One of the women who worked at the church I worked at had a female Siamese cat who clearly got out and mixed with a different category of cat altogether with the result being a half dozen kittens who needed homes. We picked one out. He was really mostly white, not Siamese in color, his fur was long, not short, and he had just a couple of spots on him that looked like Siamese coloring. We named him after Cathy, but we never called him anything but Kitty.

Kitty wasn't comfortable in a crowd. If we had guests for dinner, Kitty would disappear, but not usually until after giving me a swipe of his claws to let me know he wasn't happy about having to share his space.

Image by david_pics, via Flickr

While Kitty didn't inherit much in the way of Siamese coloring, he did inherit a Siamese voice. When he was outside and wanted to come in, there was no way I was going to sleep through it. And because I didn't want to discover he was bothering my neighbors, too, my internal detectors got me up and out of bed very quickly to let him in. Usually he just wanted a light snack to be followed almost immediately with another cry to go back outside. So I thought I could address it by putting his food out on the back porch.  That failed. Kitty would come to the front door to cry to get in and once in, he would make his way to the kitchen where he expected his food dish to be. When he discovered it wasn't there, he just cried again to be let out the back door where he eventually found his food, right where I put it.

After three years of his living with me in Berkeley, I needed to find a new home for Kitty because I would be moving across the bay to San Francisco for graduate school. My sister came up with the solution. She had a friend who had just gotten married and they were looking for a pet. So I packed up Kitty in an orange crate box, put him on the passenger seat of my VW beetle, and drove to Costa Mesa to spend Christmas with my aunt and her family. Since my aunt had a dog, Kitty spent the entire week behind the sofa in her living room, out of reach of the dog. From Costa Mesa, where my parents, sister, and three of my brothers met me, I drove to Phoenix with my sister and Kitty to spend a few days with my grandparents. Kitty spent that week in a closet. Eventually my sister and I made it to Minnesota, Kitty moved in with her new family, and I understand my sister's friend's husband trained him to bring him his slippers when he got home from work.