a loaner cat
Joseph Brenner
After struggling along nearly catless for some months, Dangerbaby and I
have had a cat fall into our lives... a young woman we knew from
Cellspace, a nomadic burner/raver type has been leading a fairly
unsettled existance and needed a place to stash her cat for
awhile... the duration of the cats stay has gotten longer (and we
suspect, and actual hope, may stretch on longer).
What's odd about this one is that she's yet another black cat... it's
not like we go out of our way to find black cats, they just seem to fall
into our lives like this. This one is so much like our last one someone
who didn't know them well might actually be confused about it.
She's actually somewhat bigger, and more muscular, but much less
graceful... if anything, she's even more territorial and selective than
our last cat. No interest in dealing with anyone but their adopted
humans, and definitely no interest in messing around with any other
felines...
Her full name is Delilah, "Dali" for short:
Joseph Brenner
Jennie Kermode <"Jennie Kermode"@triffid.demon.co.uk> writes:
> Joseph Brenner <do...@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>> She's actually somewhat bigger, and more muscular, but much less
>> graceful... if anything, she's even more territorial and selective
>> than our last cat. No interest in dealing with anyone but their
>> adopted humans, and definitely no interest in messing around with any
>> other felines...
> She looks like the sort of cat whom other felines would be
> well advised not to mess with.
True enough, but Dali is inclined to retreat rather than fight
(as was Zima, before her).
> And she looks like she's making herself very much at home.
Yes, I would say it took her a half-hour at most to get the idea.
"Oh, I don't *need* to hide, I can hang out on top of this loft and
keep an eye on things from a secure position."
Rather than force her to learn to deal with the environment of our
apartment, we set-up our bedroom and the attached small room in the
back as a kind of isolated kitty-apartment. Cat box in the back
room, food up on top of the loft over the bed (which for us is a
matress on the floor... a good arrangement if you usually want to
convince animals to sleep with you).
Things are a little unsettled in our apartment of late-- our roomate
has suddenly adopted a hobby of inviting drunks home, and she's
continually taking care of a large, ill-trained dog owned by one of
the drunks. Her two cats are essentially dispossessed now, and
they're always hanging around outside her bedroom door (right next
to ours), and one of them has a history of picking fights with
strange cats -- that's in fact why she's at our place, and not
somewhere else.
We leave the bed room door open on occasion, and she will dart
around through "enemy territory" briefly, but she runs back home
almost immediately.