Earlier today, everyone was home, doing their various things. My mom, youngest sister, and niece in the kitchen. My brother getting his shower, my other sister in her room, and me in mine, surfing the Dope. There’s a loud crash from the back door, my niece screams, and my mom hollers for me. Thinking my idiot stepfather had decided to finally carry out the threat he made 10 years ago, I grab one of my aluminum bats and rush into the kitchen. My niece is pointing under the desk that holds the fish tank, and my mom is laughing her ass off. I go take a look, and found the intruder that’s making all the ruckus.
She’s all of 5 weeks old, judging by her eyes, face, and teeth, and scared to death. A few weeks ago a feral cat got into the root cellar under the house, and had a litter, which she eventually moved to an abandoned house across the road from mine. When she moved the rest of the litter, she left this baby behind. I got the little thing out from under the house, brought it in, and fed it until the mama cat came back 8 hours later. I put the baby outside, and she took it off with the others. I haven’t seen her or the kittens since, until last week, when this one started following my cat around. Anytime I tried to get close, the young one would run away and hide in the kudzu field outside.
I don’t know what made the little one decide to crash through the back door, but now that she’s inside and interacting with people, she’s going to be taken care of, either until I find her a good home, or until I decide to keep her, whichever comes first.
Whenever anyone says this, it always, in practice, translates to “I’ve decided to keep her”. You may not know it yet, but your decision is already set in stone.
I had a vet say that this was planned parenthood…that is, that the cat or kitten plans to get a parent. And it looks like she’s picked your family to be hers.
It’s starting to look like I’m going to have to find her a home instead of keeping her. Taffy, the other cat I posted a pic of, isn’t liking having the intruder in the house one bit. Outside they’re fine together, but in the house he gets surly and won’t have anything to do with anyone until the newbie is put outside.
Give it a few weeks - at least a month, even. It takes them a while. I was in tears for weeks after I got my second cat because I thought I’d ruined the first one’s life, and then I came home one day to find them snuggling together in a cat bed on the windowsill. They saw me and ran away, embarrassed.
Yea, that’s my second youngest sister. She’s never happy unless she’s drunk or stoned.
I probably will give the kitten a couple of weeks or so before I try finding her a home. It’ll take that long to get her spayed, wormed, and her shots.
It was instrumental in getting our cats to live together under one roof. Circumstance required that we somehow get an ex-outdoor “king-of-the-block” cat and an indoor “only-child” kitty to get along in a one-bedroom apartment. That book really helped us figure out how to introduce them and let them adjust to each other and the new setup without the usual kitty drama. The $.05 version is that to start with, each cat needs firmly defined territory, introductions should be controlled but not forced (the whole “Hold both cats so they can’t run away and shove their faces at each other” thing = bad idea), and the whole thing should happen over a longish period of time. It takes weeks, not days.
The end result for us is two cats that are extremely well adjusted to one another. While they’re not “pals”, they will share rooms, food dishes, people, and neither ever developed any really bad behavior traits as a result of the change. Quite a trick for 2 adult cats.
