Thursday, August 7, 2008

How we came to have three kitties

Chloe is my kitty—I got her shortly after 9/11 and she’s really truly my cat. She will let Kent pet her now, after six years together but it took him probably two years before he could do that.

Then we got Sammie almost two years ago. He was another rescue kitty, about seven months old and pure black. I do have pictures but since he’s all black you can’t really see any details. Sammie was the first kitten that Kent had really ever lived with, and Sammie is the reason Kent came over to the dark side and is now a cat person.

However it turned out that Sammie had FIP which is always fatal. He died just over a year ago, at about 14 months. In addition to grieving for our lil guy, we also felt cheated. He was such a fun kitty and we didn’t even get to enjoy him for a year. Our vet, who was fantastic during the whole ordeal, asked that when we were ready to adopt again, we consider a cat from his practice. Apparently people dump animals there all the time—he said it was very normal for him to get to work to find dogs tied to the railing, or a box with kittens just left there.

So that’s what we did. We wanted to get one more cat so we’d be a two-kitty family again, and we liked the idea of rescuing another cat. We thought we’d look for one between one and about three or four years old so that Chloe wouldn’t have a super dominating cat annoying her—in other words, no kittens.

Get ready to laugh at us.

We went there on a Saturday and looked at ALL his cats and holy cow he had a bunch of them. In Kansas City, you can have four pets if you live within the city limits. Apparently a woman had ended up collecting and/or rescuing 37—yes you read that correctly, thirty-seven!!—cats and someone had turned her in to animal control. So we looked at every one of those cats. They were all very well cared for and decently socialized but too old for us.

Then we heard kitten meows. Oh, we say, you have kittens? May we look at them? Suckers! They were two litter mates, both boys and about three months old. We each picked one up and we said well we could take one of these guys. Then they started crying for each other.

Yeah, we took them both home.

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