I have 3 cats, inside. All strays, one I adopted from shelter, he is the baby, named pumpkin. One is black, 5 years, named Boo. And I just adopted this HUGE Tom cat, got him fixed, he is really big. He is missing an ear, missing his canine teeth, he is a mess, but i fell in love with him recently. He came with some ferals, but he doesn't act feral. I named him George. He is laying on my foot as I type this.

Unfortunatly I'm taking care of his little family outside. I'm cool with that. I wish I could catch them. I got them an electric house in the back. So they won't freeze. Ok I am officially crazy cat woman.

I have facebook pictures, look for Linda dreamchaser on facebook, I have garden, cat, lots of pictures.
=)
Lin


I have always had cats. They make me happy.

aww lin that's so kind of you to try and help your local feral colony! you might try calling your local pound or town shelter - they often work with people who do TNR (trap-neuter(or spay)-release). or a local no-kill animal group. i have a friend that does it, but we also have at least one organization on long island that will come and do it for free.

i also know some animal shelters will rent you the traps for a small fee (one here was $5) and you catch them. here, you can call your local town animal shelter and tell them you are trapping feral cats and want to have them spayed/neutered and vaccinated. our local shelter will spay/neuter, give a rabies vaccine, and tip their ear for free. we made an appointment, dropped the cats off, picked them up later that day. we had to keep them somewhere safe in the cage for 2-3 days, feed them, and then release them.

one of the ones we trapped actually had a horribly infected uterus - thank goddess we got her when we did. they did the surgery for free and told us we had to keep her safe for five days. we decided to borrow a friend's dog crate and set her up in a storage room in our house (it was too cold outside and i fell in love with this tiny girl). we gave her a tiny litter pan - which she took to right away - and kept her warm and fed. she hissed at us on day three because she felt better. we ended up making her an insulated house out of totes and insulating foam, which she used every night.

we released her back to the neighborhood and she always came back to us. she would let us pet her, she'd rub on our legs once in a while, and we would feed her - but we could never catch her again. when we moved further our east, we tried our hardest to catch her again. we wanted to have her tested for fiv/felv and if she was negative, we were going to take her with us. but it was like she knew and didn't want to be an indoor cat. she would still let us pet her, but we could not pick her up and she got wise to the trap.

the last few times we saw her, she was with a big, manky, tabby tom who was lording over our stoop. i watched them wander around together. i like to think that they became best friends and he made sure she was safe. i'm going to stick with that because it hurt me that she wouldn't come with us (although i think it hurt my husband more. he's a softie once in a while).

All of you cat people are making my nose and eyes itch :p DOG family over here and ofcourse small rodents are welcome too :)

I think they did become close friends Steph. My fixed Tom is still close to his family outside. They rub on each other all the time.

I got the cage to catch. I just don't have the heart to do it yet. Never had feral cats. It's a timing thing right now.

All these stories are so great. Best topic ever.

=)
Lin

I have three cats two dogs three guineas fifteen chickens and three roosters and one husband, I stay busy too.

I like cats and have shared my life with more than a few in the past. After I lost my last cat to kidney failure, I just didn't want another one. I have two dogs now that were both rescues. One is a little min-pin mix named Diva and the other is an aussie mix called Homer. We have a large fenced in back yard and a doggy door so they are easy to care for. They both sense when I'm having a bad day and come to cuddle with me.
sherrie

Oh how lovely - a cat thread!! I had three matching kitties when I joined this site. The eldest two were sisters and left me in 2009 (different months). That left the youngest who features in my photos on this site.

She was born in 1999. My friend had a cat called Sylvester, aged about 10 months. Her daughter (7) came running in saying "Sylvester has stolen some kittens and is hiding them in the airing cupboard".. Sylvester had to be renamed Sylvie and I took the one that looked the two I already had although they never really all got on together.

I think I quoted on here once about a saying I read which goes roughtly: "There are two solaces to the miseries of life" music and cats".

I volunteer at my local SPCA and always talk about going to see the pussies even though I feed the dogs as well.

so happy to hear from other feline friends! i've added photos of my three kittehs to my photos on here. my piglet is a dilute calico, all pastel orange and grey and white. her and her mother and sister were forcibly removed from a man's home when piglet was about 6 months old. their 'owner' fed them popcorn. apparently, ONLY popcorn. we couldn't get more information on the case than that. when i saw her, there was another woman waiting to see cats at the town shelter. she wanted to see piglet! i was so sad. but we waited anyway. the woman came back holding piglet out at arm's length, her back legs dangling, and said curtly, 'i don't want THIS cat'. the shelter worker put her back in the cage, turned to me, my hubby, and my bff, and asked which cat we wanted to see. i said 'i want that one, the one you just put back'. she was like, don't you want to hold her? i said no - i knew i wanted her and wanted her as soon as possible. they had to mark her forehead with a red marker to tell her apart from her sister, and i picked her up three days later on my 25th birthday (after she'd been spayed and vaccinated). piglet hates to be held or snuggled, but loves headbutts and scratches and ear rubs and she makes the best purr chirpy noises. and she makes muffins on me all the time (the proper name for making muffins/kneading is smurgling. isn't that odd?).

samantha is white, appears to be an oriental shorthair mix. her fur is like a mink coat - so thick and soft and omg sometimes i joke about taking it off and making a coat. it seems like her skin is a size too big for her. she sits on the floor in a puddle of skin and fur lol. she never knew a day of want - her mother was rescued from behind a hair salon two days before she gave birth. she appears to have no sense of smell. sammy is a smuggler - she likes to climb up on my shoulder and put her tummy against my ear and purr while i'm working on the computer.

jake.... well, jake is another story. after my mother passed, my husband and i were at the pet store to get cat food (which was like a weekly trip for us). we always stopped at the cages from whichever local rescue group was doing adoptions that weekend. we'd poke our fingers in and coo and aww over them, then leave. then walk away, after tossing a buck or two in the can. we did not want a fourth cat (we still had my old family cat at this point). but my husband stopped in front of the last cage, looking and poking at two tabby kittens. they were so tiny! he asked a question about one.... hmm, interesting. he liked cats but wasn't really a 'cat person'. he then asked to hold the cat! he was breaking the rules! we don't take them out of the cage because you know what happens! the tiny kitten, all 4 pounds of him, melted into my husband's arms and he just looked at me. damn it, we were getting another cat. but jake has been a blessing, if a huge, aggressive, feral blessing.

jake was rescued off the streets of orlando at about 2 months - he was alone and dirty. because he was young, the rescue organization decided he'd be a good for adoption. he got along well with the other kittens at the shelter. we brought him home, the other cats were NOT thrilled, but we had a go at it. i noticed jake walking funny, so off to the vet to have it checked. after some X-rays, we found that one of his knees had been SHATTERED; as he's full grown now, one leg is almost an inch shorter than the other :( (that's an estimate). the vet says he was probably either tossed from a car or kicked by a person for that kind of injury. it's completely healed, so it can't be like fixed or anything. i'm hoping to have another round of X-rays soon to see how his hips have adjusted.

jake is assertive. he likes to tease piglet, who likes to scream like a little baby, and if it goes far enough samantha jumps in and smacks everyone. it's kind of cute, but i do miss the old days. before jake, piglet and samantha would snuggle with each other all the time. now, not so much. sometimes i worry that we did the wrong thing by bringing jake in. but it was wonderful to have a new addition to them home after my mother died. maybe one day they'll all cuddle in a cat pile. i can hope.

Three must be the magic number. Although we have had as many as six at a time, we've been at three for several years now. Plus a dog. Plus a few kids.

we never had any pets. me and hubby are scared of fur animals. but my toddler loves dogs. whenever i take her for a walk and if she sees any dog she immediately sits on the pavement and starts crying saying "doggy, doggy, doggy" and i have a hard time to make her stop crying and get her home back. i wanted to get a small puppy for her, but i think its a lot of work and i cant handle it right now. so i will leave it to my child. when she gets little big and still loves to have a dog she may get one, but she has to do everything for her puppy (bathing, feeding, and so on) but we dont eat any meat or fish. so i dont know how to feed dogs without meat.
thanks for posting this. i dont know anything about cats or dogs, but i liked all your comments about them. its very interesting. i wonder how they change our lives. i had one friend who loves dogs and unfortunately it died and she had a very tough time to recover from the loss of her dog. this is when i was in school. good, i still remember.

I have 2 little dogs. We used to have big dogs, but now it's too easy to knock me over. They bring me so much comfort. Cat or dog, you can't beat them for being best friends...

Morgan - no one will love you like your two little dogs.... I still prefer cats and sometimes they can be very attached but dogs just give it out no matter what.

I have a great poster on a door with a picture of a beautiful golden retriever. It's headed: "things I have learned from my dog" and it ends with one I think we should all really live by:

"No matter how often you are criticized dont buy into the guilt thing and pout. Run right back and make friends."

I have been in vet med for 20 years . . . I have one that we have to be careful with if we give her a bowl to lick. Even if she doesn't like/want it she will beg for it. If there is a blanket nearby, it will end up in the dish.
She does the same thing in the litter pan.

Though I will take this over those who refuse to take two additional steps forward so they may defecate IN the box, instead of on the floor.

Like one of the doctors I used to work with would say, "They don't live in our homes, we live in their's"

I always thought of myself as a dog person- my family had both dogs and cats when I was a kid, but I was only attached to the dogs. My wife is a true cat person, and we have an apartment in the city, so I resigned myself to living with her cats ( she had two when we first met). Fast forward five years. Several months after one of "her" cats died suddenly, we went to the local shelter. I was lured with the promise of a chance to play with some puppies. I sat down in a chair and a big tabby cat with white feet climbed up in my lap. I just knew she was giving me her seal of approval. We took her home, and she has the best personality ever. We named her Dinette. In my photo, that's me taking a nap, and you can see her curled up behind my knees. She sleeps next to me every night. She's the most social cat I've ever met- when we have friends over, she wants to hang out in the living room too. She even has a trick - if you show her a treat, she sits up like a groundhog and begs for it, and she can usually catch it in the air. Last year, we noticed she was losing weight and her breath was really bad. Turns out she had an autoimmune disease! She was basically reacting to her own teeth. The cure was to have all of her teeth removed. She recovered like a champ, and she's back to catching treats in her mouth. I'm still hoping for a dog someday, but I love this cat!

caren, what a great story! i always believe that cats choose us - we don't choose them. as much as i like to think that this apartment is mine and my husband's, it's my cats.

all three of my cats are what i consider special needs. very mild special needs. i already mentioned jake has that leg injury, and samantha can't smell. piglet appears to have feline rhinocalcivirus - cat herpes. it's actually very common in shelter cats and is easy to transmit, so my other cats probably have it as well. but piglet is the only one that is symptomatic. we have never tested for herpes because it's an expensive blood test and it's not like there are tons of treatment options. cat herpes for piglet means her eye weeps. usually just her left eye. but when her herpes is really active, her eye weeps so much that she loses the hair at the inner corner of her eye. i call it 'crying eye' and we wipe it and use warm washcloths to wash away any eye boogies. sometimes i use sterile saline to wash her eye out a bit. and we give her l-lysine.

it's taken me YEARS to find ways to give it to her that she'll take (she is very, very, very picky, even for a cat). i recently found these l-lysine treats at a local independent pet food store that she actually likes, and each one is 250mg (recommended dose for herpes is 500mg/daily). the l-lysine stops the herpes virus cells from replicating so it helps the symptoms go away. even with the l-lysine, sometimes she gets weepy eyes, but it helps a lot.

i've also found that switching to the grain-free/raw diet seems to help a bit too. i'm a freaking huge advocate for raw/BARF feeding. and it's becoming easier with some more commercially prepared options.