Backyard critters

[imref]

Thanks for the support. We had made an appointment for Wednesday afternoon, but she declined further last night and we both agreed we should see if it could be today. They said they can take us at 10:00. This is going to be a brutal day in our house.

Sorry 1995hoo and family.

[Natsinpwc]

Hang in there Hoo.

[1995hoo]

Well, now I see where the euphemism "put to sleep" comes from. Afterwards, she looked like she was peacefully sound asleep on the vet's table.

Making the decision was brutal and was harder than actually having it done.

[wj73]

💔

[English Natsie]

You have shown how much you cared, for Precious, by doing the right thing by her at the end. Amazing how close we get to those little bundles of fur...

[1995hoo]

Thanks to all of you. Yesterday was a brutal day. We went to the Caps game last night and I haven't felt so disengaged from a sporting event I attended since a day in 2008 when we drove down to Charlottesville for a football game and, right as we turned in to park the car, we got a call from Florida saying Ms1995hoo's father had died. But we went to that game because she said it was pointless to turn around and drive right back home because it wouldn't do anything. Went to the Caps game last night because, frankly, playoff tickets are too expensive to leave unused. Our ticket partners were unable to go and it was too much hassle to try to sell tickets on such short notice.

The morning after is making me realize all the little things you come to take for granted when your pet is around. For several years now my morning routine has involved Precious waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs and meowing to be fed, my walking around the lower two floors of the house to check her litterbox and to check for any throw-ups, feeding her, and then after breakfast sitting on the lower step to brush her for a while. It made me feel way ahead of schedule when I finished eating this morning and then I realized it was because I didn't do any of those things.

[imref]

Are you thinking about getting another cat (or two)?

[wj73]

Putting the food and water bowls away is the worst for me. It just makes it all seem so final.


Somehow getting the ashes back is comforting. It’s like they’re back home again. I know that seems silly, but somehow it helps ease the empty place in my heart when they’ve come home again.


How can the absence of such a little animal make a whole house feel empty?

[1995hoo]

Are you thinking about getting another cat (or two)?

Probably, but we're going to wait a little while for both emotional and practical reasons. As to the latter, we have some weekend trips planned this summer, so we want to wait until after those, and we also have a potential problem in that our neighbors who came over to feed Precious and check her litterbox when we did go out of town are going to be moving away. So we have to figure out what we will do in that situation. The neighbor on the other side used to help us with that (and we reciprocated for her), but we had a falling-out with her over an unrelated issue last year so she is no longer an option.

My wife was talking about another senior cat. She doesn't want kittens because our house is not really ideal for them (she has lots of plants; various breakable objects that kittens would probably knock over) and one of the things we really liked about Precious was that she was fairly calm and didn't try to jump up on things like the china cabinet or the bobblehead shelves (there are 50+ bobbleheads in the family room). I'm sort of torn because I don't want to put ourselves through this emotional wringer again in just a few years. Maybe a "less senior" senior cat might be sensible—the Alexandria animal shelter defines "senior cat" as eight years or older. Precious was 14 when we took her in, so we always knew we were going to have only a few years.

I've suggested the possibility of a bonded pair because sometimes I worried that Precious was bored during the day when I was in my home office working. She wasn't particularly into cat toys other than the motorized thing with the feather. A bonded pair would entertain each other. But finding a bonded pair of senior cats is very difficult.

[Natsinpwc]

This is why I don’t want another dog even though the wife brings it up.  We are out daughters dog most days and she is getting old also.  Gate to think of going through this with her. 

[English Natsie]

By nature, cats prefer to be solitary, so I would always go for being a one-cat household. Even in multi-cat households, the cats will establish a territorial regime whereby each cat has 'its' rooms - although squabbles will be inevitable in forcibly shared spaces, such as the hallway.

[imref]

By nature, cats prefer to be solitary, so I would always go for being a one-cat household. Even in multi-cat households, the cats will establish a territorial regime whereby each cat has 'its' rooms - although squabbles will be inevitable in forcibly shared spaces, such as the hallway.

cats actually generally do much better in pairs. Less stress, especially when left alone. Our two were inseparable until one died last year. Ever since, the other is always next to or in someone’s lap.

[English Natsie]

A useful guide...

https://icatcare.org/articles/multi-cat-households

[1995hoo]

By nature, cats prefer to be solitary, so I would always go for being a one-cat household. Even in multi-cat households, the cats will establish a territorial regime whereby each cat has 'its' rooms - although squabbles will be inevitable in forcibly shared spaces, such as the hallway.

Heh, and then you have our relatives in Broward County. They have a dog and six cats. I guess it’s a good thing that their daughter (who is 18) is still pretty naive and doesn’t understand the double entendre when I say they live in a cathouse.

They didn’t set out to have six cats. Two of them are very recent rescues, one a kitten that got trapped under the hood of a car across the street.

[Ali the Baseball Cat]

Oh man.  Sorry to hear this...I know the feeling all too well. 

[imref]

Heh, and then you have our relatives in Broward County. They have a dog and six cats. I guess it’s a good thing that their daughter (who is 18) is still pretty naive and doesn’t understand the double entendre when I say they live in a cathouse.

They didn’t set out to have six cats. Two of them are very recent rescues, one a kitten that got trapped under the hood of a car across the street.

We had a pair of unrelated rescues (M&F) growing up that we adopted around the same time. They got along fairly well and when one passed, the other went shortly after. After college I had a single cat for 18 years that adopted a friend of mine. He followed her into her apartment from the parking lot and decided he didn't want to be a stray anymore. She couldn't keep him so we took him. He made it to 18 and was a wonderful cat, very intelligent and affectionate.

After he died we waited about a month to adopt two unrelated kittens, both male. They took about a day to get used to each other and then, as I mentioned, were inseparable. They always slept next to one another, played with each other constantly, and just got along very well. We had to put one of them down at age 11 last January due to neurological issues. The other one is still going strong, but like I said, became way more clingy after he lost his brother.  We've toyed with the idea of getting another senior cat for his companionship, but we're not sure we want to deal with the additional expense and work of getting a second. I think he'll be the last one we own as we're both getting to the age where we want to be able to travel without worrying about an animal.

[1995hoo]

.... as we're both getting to the age where we want to be able to travel without worrying about an animal.

That is the thing that somewhat concerns me because the people next-door who came over to feed Precious and scoop her box when we were out of town are going to be moving away. I know there are people you can pay to come by and do that, but I'm just extremely wary and skeptical of allowing a stranger to have access to our house when we are not here.

Telecommuting (which I do pretty much full-time—I have not yet had to go into the office in 2025) makes having a pet around that much easier. It also makes the empty house that much more noticeable now.

[1995hoo]

The lady who introduced us to Precious told my wife about another cat who was available for adoption. We met her on Saturday and she is now snoozing on the couch next to me as I type this. This cat is younger than Precious was when we adopted her—they think she’s about six, whereas Precious was 14. Last night, as mentioned in the food thread, we had a dinner reservation that took us away for somewhat over five hours (an hour’s drive each way plus a leisurely dining experience), so we shut her up in the master bathroom with a litterbox, food and water, and a bed. Worked well and we decided to keep her in there overnight last night. We let her out this morning and we’ve allowed her to explore the house. She spent a good chunk of the morning napping in the sun on the living room floor. Then when I went to Wegmans my wife said she was napping in her bed but woke up when I got home.

She’s a very affectionate cat—constantly rubbing up against us (she was even rubbing her head under my armpit, of all places, when I sat down on the stairs) and loves being petted/scratched under the chin. She is more active in terms of jumping on things than Precious was, but I suppose we knew that just about any cat would be more likely to be that way. We have to get her a taller tower/cat tree than the one we have, so I’ve already ordered that (but it won’t come until next Tuesday). I also ordered some "Panther Armor" double-sided tape sheets to protect the couches (that should come this Tuesday). I think we're probably going to need to rearrange a few things—my wife has some glassware and stuff below the hutch on a china cabinet and has picture frames on top of it, so I’ve suggested to her we swap that arrangement to put the glassware higher up. The main thing now is figuring out what to do this coming weekend. We're going to my class reunion in Charlottesville and I’m wary of just giving her the run of the house, but I’m also not sure I like the idea of shutting her up in the master bathroom from Friday to Sunday. It just feels wrong somehow. The lady next door is going to come over to feed her and scoop the litterbox, so there’s that. (Originally the plan was to wait until after my reunion to look for a cat, but we trusted the judgment of the lady who introduced us to Precious and we figured the cat might not remain available had we waited.)

We haven’t decided on a name yet. The place where we got her called her Soulweaver. My wife doesn’t much like that name (it makes me think of that Gary Wright song "Dream Weaver") and the cat doesn’t respond to it, so renaming her is fine, but we just haven’t decided what. People tell me it’ll come to us after a few days.

I haven’t yet taken a picture that satisfies me enough to post here. Her fur is darker overall but is almost a mixture of black and bronze (for lack of a better description). It makes a good picture a little tricky. We have a picture from yesterday when I was lying on the couch and she climbed up and lay down on my stomach to be petted. But it’s a clearer picture of me than it is of her. I think it’s probably best for a new cat to look different from its predecessor simply for emotional reasons and so that you’re not expecting the new one to be just like the former one.

[imref]

Congrats!

[English Natsie]

Good news - she'll soon settle down into an established routine, which you'll get to know. She's also clearly well socialized, which is a good start. Changing the tower is good, if only to remove previous scent (cats use scratching as a scent marker). If there's somewhere you really don't want her to go, you can always use the water mist method - when she approaches the spot, gently spray her, on the nose, with a fine water mist. This (generally) dissuades cats from that location. Given that it's still within the 28 day period (that cats need to learn their new environment) you just want to be sure that she can navigate to the tray - if so then she should be OK without being confined. Your neighbor should be reminded to prevent any escape outside - again, the 28 days means that she would struggle to navigate back. The only room to exclude is the kitchen - cats are remarkably resourceful, when it comes to food. We once made the mistake of thinking that a sealed boxed cake, on a high surface, would be safe - when we returned, there was a torn box and cake strewn all over the kitchen, with a certain puss sitting there with buttercream all over his whiskers, giving us a look as if to say 'it wasn't me...' 

[wj73]

Congratulations, Hoo!!! She sounds lovely.

[1995hoo]

Amazon delivered the "Panther Armor" stuff a day early. It’s essentially large sheets of double-sided tape. I’ve put it on both ends of the small couch and one end of the large couch and you wouldn’t know it was there unless you were looking closely (I already bumped into it once and it stuck to my jeans). We'll see how well it works. We have multiple scratching pads around, and I did see her using the sisal support post on the tower, but I guess the couch looks tempting.

[1995hoo]

So we are debating whether we need to confine her at night for the time being. My wife is an extremely light sleeper; I'm normally a very sound sleeper. Precious used to scratch at the bedroom door and meow, waking my wife up, until we got a Retract-a-Gate to block the stairs (and we also had to put one of those draft guard things behind it so she couldn't crawl under it). That worked quite well. It's not going to work for the new cat because she figured out how to jump through the railing to get around the gate. My wife is feeling a bit under the weather, so she's slept in the guest room the past two nights while I stayed in the master bedroom. I decided last night to leave the bedroom and master bathroom doors ajar because the cat knows there's a litterbox in the master bathroom. I figured she spent a lot of time sitting next to me on the couch such that she might just curl up on the bed. That didn't happen, though she did come in and explore a bit. The downside: While I was sleeping, she tried to jump up on top of the TV cabinet. It's too high and she failed, but she jumped just high enough to be able to tug on a table-runner type thing my wife has on top of the cabinet, which resulted in a clock falling off with a crash. (Clock still works. A bit of the plastic casing broke.) My wife says the cat spent a lot of the night in the guest room. I slept OK. Not as well as usual. Part of that was due to her waking me up, part was due to the temperature (cool air outside meant it was too warm inside until I opened a window, but then around 3:00 the birds started outside and I had to close it). Normally it takes a lot to wake me up because in the mid-1990s I lived near an at-grade railroad crossing.

So we are conflicted about whether we should confine her somewhere at night, at least for a few more weeks, or whether we should just close both bedroom doors and otherwise let her roam. While I don't want her jumping up on the kitchen counter, at least if she does it at night the stove won't be hot. Precious was not a jumper for the most part (to be sure, she was also 14 years old when we adopted her and this cat is estimated to be 6 years old), so we haven't dealt with this issue before. My inclination is to close the bedroom doors (leaving the guest room open if neither of us is in there, closing it when one of us sleeps there when we get sick). Maybe that means relocating the secondary litterbox from the master bathroom to somewhere else.

[dracnal]

From my own experience with cats, many of them will want to spend at least some part of the night sleeping with their humans, if given a chance, so you'll likely have at least an initial period of door scratching and meowing if you keep her out. That will likely settle down some in time but she'll likely wake your wife up at least once in a while. Inconsistent things are a bigger issue and I suspect you're probably better off keeping the guest bedroom door closed most of the time rather than just when someone is sleeping in there. The cat is way more likely to want in if it's only closed on occasion and it sounds like a recipe for a really bad night's sleep for your wife if she's under the weather, sleeping lightly, and the cat wants in all night.

Cats can have an elevation preference in addition to whether or not they've got the hips for jumping and it sounds like you've got one that likes the high road. I suspect you'll have better luck taking a baby proofing approach of getting breakable stuff out of likely impact areas (leave the clock, lose the runner in your one example). Adjusting the areas where she's likely to go will be MUCH easier than trying to train her or change her habits, and trying to restrain an aerial focused cat is usually an exercise in frustration for both of you.

[1995hoo]

Thanks. I was thinking we should at least fold the ends of the runner up on top of the TV cabinet so they're not dangling down in an enticing way.