Back in 1984, during the Worlds Fair (in New Orleans), a house down the street from my Aunt’s burned. There was a new litter of kittens in the house and the mother cat died. My Aunt rescued two of them and kept them as pets. The first died about 3 years ago. The second died around 6 months ago. They were very antisocial cats and I never got a good look at the first one. The second one became strangely social about 6 months before she died and actually let me touch her. They were strange cats and I actually doubted their existence for a while.
My other aunt had a cat that was around 20 years old. Back around 1992, I worked with my uncle for a summer and I became acquainted with this cat. At that time, she was a large fully grown cat (resembled a Maine Coon) and she’d come running up to me whenever I went to their house. Last year, I stopped by for a visit…I hadn’t been there in a few years…and this hairy bag-of-bones came running up to me. She looked like she was already dead but she didn’t know it or act like it yet. She could still jump from the kitchen table to the counter like a kitten. She died about 6 months ago and they figured her to be somewhere between 20 and 21 years old.
Note that an outdoor cat’s life expectancy is ~5 years. So a 10-year-old non-housecat really is quite the marvel. But the 17-year-old indoor cat who’s complaining that I stopped petting her to type this post is not particularly unusual in her longevity … Context is everything!
We had an indoor/outdoor (mostly outdoor) cat named Maxie when I was a kid. Hell of a hunter. Anyway, she lived to be a very vocal but mostly deaf 21, when she finally passed away in front of the fire one night. By then, my mom had taken to occasionally leaning over her to yell “Go toward the light, Maxie! Go toward the light!”
Maxie outlived her son, Bob, also indoor/outdoor, who died of old age around 18.
I can assure you that a 12-year-old cat is no surprise to me. I just wanted to compile a list of people who aren’t ashamed to tell the world how old their cats are.
Quit with the WTFs already. Isn’t it obvious that he thought the story was pretty cool and that the joke is remarking on the age of the cat rather than the fact it takes the bus around town? But ultimately the point of the thread is to talk about a cat who travels by bus.
