My cat Willow, 14 years young this year….
Dear Readers, if you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m ‘owner’ (Hah!) of this little black rescue cat. Willow is about fourteen years old this year, and apart from a touch of high blood pressure and some slightly dodgy kidney numbers from her last blood tests, she’s been doing pretty well. She is completely deaf and a little less agile going downstairs (though she’s still more than able to jump onto the bed and headbutt my coffee mug until the duvet is caffeinated).
I have always loved rescue cats – I fostered for about ten years all told, first for Cats Protection and then for the RSPCA. You can see some of the characters that I looked after here. If you aren’t quite ready to take on a cat of your own, I can highly recommend fostering – you get the support of the charity that you’re fostering for, you get to experience a lot of different cats and to learn a whole lot about looking after them, and then your heart gets broken every time when they move to a new home. I’m (semi) joking about the last point – actually you do get the satisfaction of a job well done as yet another cat goes off reign in his or her new fiefdom. I think that, when our little cat passes away I may well go back to fostering, maybe concentrating on older or sicker cats that nobody else wants – a kind of ‘cat hospice’ if you will. But hopefully Willow will be with us for many years to come, following the sunbeams around the house, telling me that it’s time to go to bed every night at ten o’clock and demanding breakfast at a slightly earlier hour every day.
And although this is not a cat blog (allegedly), do let me know about your own cats! One thing I learned from fostering is that every single cat has a different personality, and I would not have believed the variations, nor how cats change over time. Willow has learned, just in the past few months, to tap me with her paw if she wants her head stroked, and very endearing/annoying it is too. My Mum had a cat that loved carrots, and we all know about the truly magnificent Bailey. Cats can bring people together, cause family rifts, be as gentle as lambs or as ferocious as tigers. They can cost us a fortune in vet’s fees, destroy our flower beds, murder the birds that visit our gardens or they may sit surrounded by sparrows who know that their would-be predator is not in a killing frame of mind. Do share!
After my cat died at 22 years old I couldn’t face getting another one but I started fostering kittens. It has been very rewarding to see how happy the new owners are when they find their “match” and I get the pleasure of looking after the kittens for a few weeks, they are all so different and amazing.
Kittens are such a handful but so rewarding – you just never know what they’re going to get up to next!
You forgot: totally ruin your sofas by scratching them. Mine are in tatters but she must do it by moonlight. A black, shiny beauty, rescued eight years ago and queen of the house.
Oh lordy, my sofa too, and one of my armchairs. And that’s with a couple of ‘scratching poles’ sitting unmolested around the house. Your cat sounds beautiful, Anne.
Willow is gorgeous!
I fostered litters of kittens for years, even a couple of motherless litters for whom I had to wake every few hours all night to bottle feed, clean, and stimulate them to go pee. It was exhausting but rewarding work, and when you have a herd of kittens who have grown big enough to start climbing curtains and your pant legs, you’re only to glad to see them go to their new families!
I never had a “foster fail” (where you adopt one of your fosters), but all of my cats came from a shelter. I have three. If interested, you can see them on Instagram at @orlando_the_marmalade_cat
Indeed, they all have their own personalities and quirks! I had a cat who loved corn and also would tear into the kitchen waste to eat (and then vomit up) cantaloupe rinds! I had another who absolutely lived and breathed moth hunting, and could subsequently leap higher than any cat I’ve had, the better to clap those moths between her big paddy paws.
Although my cats are old (16, 14, and 12) and have given up hunting, when they were younger, they wore BirdBeSafe collars during spring and summer. They really work! The cats looked like little circus clowns, but we didn’t tell
them that.
As far as expensive cats go, I fervently and frequently recommend vet insurance. After Orlando had an unexplained and scary case of pyothorax at age 3, which cost us $6000, we got vet insurance and were so glad, because he was later hospitalized for blocked urethra (common in males), and 2 years ago, had to have a rare brain surgery to the tune of $25K. We would have had to put him down without insurance. but they paid 90%. They are never going to make their money back on Orlando!
Like you, I probably won’t adopt another cat after this set passes. I’d rather do fospice, or foster older cats who are difficult to adopt out.
Hi there! Those collars sound amazing – my cat is an indoor cat by choice, but I will definitely look them up if I ever get an outdoor cat again. And yes, insurance! It’s expensive, but compared to the cost of a catastrophe (pun semi-intended) it’s cheap indeed. Glad to hear that Orlando is getting his money’s worth!
And what a beauty Orlando is!
Isn’t he!? My other cats are wonderful, but not quite as striking as Orlando.