The Loveable Invasive Species
The cats have found us. We live in a rural area. My neighborhood has corn or soy fields on three sides and a road on the fourth. The other side of that road? Cornfield. There must be enough mice, lizards, and birds around to support a small population of cats. Do cats have an oral tradition? Bees can tell each other where food is. Their brains are smaller than a grain of rice and they have fewer than one million neurons in their brains. Cats have 250 million neurons. Humans have 86 billion. So, there's a spectrum. Bees can navigate using a compass direction and flight time. Cats are somewhere between bees using polar coordinates and humans putting GPS satellites in orbit and using Einstein's special relativity to navigate. So, do cats have an oral tradition? We don't have evidence for it, but maybe we've been too busy doing rocket science to really look into it.
We've lived in our house for almost eighteen years now. We brought two cats who were rescued from Baltimore with us when we moved. They were inside cats. They were the first members of Tina and my new family. They were Random and Havok. Random was named after the character from Nine Princes in Amber. Havok was named after Cyclops' brother--they're Marvel comics characters. We were trying to think of "brother" names, but we couldn't settle on a pair and instead picked two halves of two pairs of brothers.
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In late April 2010, we accidentally left the garage door open overnight. Tina, Trent, and I all left the morning after to go to work and school. We closed the garage door. Unbeknownst to us, a mother cat had left her kittens in the garage during the night while she went out to hunt. She left them a bird wing to eat. When Trent and I got back, we drove into the garage, closed the door, and on the way into the house, I saw something black and white scurry across a shelf. I thought to myself, "Oh no–there's a skunk stuck in the garage. How do I convince it to leave without--you know." You already know that it turned out to be cats.
We tried to find sister names. We considered Antigone and Ismene. We couldn't settle on a pair, but stuck with Greek mythology and named them Pandora and Antigone.
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Over the past few years, the motion-activated cameras around the house made it clear that we were perhaps on some sort of cat patrol route. It's possible that there were mice living in the crawlspace? Or maybe that we have a lot of birds that live in the trees around our house? I did my best to avoid giving these cats names. I tried to just to refer to them by their physical characteristics. I started to see Black and White Cat a lot on the cameras. I have a place in my heart for cats. They're self-sufficient beings who go about their way in the world. I fed Black and White Cat. Feeding her got her name shortened to BeeDub.
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BeeDub hung around a lot. She never accepted any human physical contact, but she was willing to sit calmly on the patio with you as long as you didn't do anything too scary. She eventually became pregnant. One day, as you might expect, she disappeared. About a week later, she showed up not pregnant. She ate some food. We never saw her again. It's possible that the father was Big Orange Cat.
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Big Orange Cat chased BeeDub up a tree one day. BeeDub stopped coming around. Big Orange Cat ate the food we put out for BeeDub. Big Orange Cat showed some signs of friendliness? One day I scratched his head and he seemed to be okay with it. I never saw him again.
There were some other visitors. Silver Cat and Tortoise Cat seemed to enjoy taunting Pandora and Tyg by sitting outside the windows and staring at them. I stopped putting food out. They lost interest eventually.
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That brings us to Messy. In the Lower Middle Grade literary adaptation of this post, I can imagine a scene where Messy has trouble. He's not feeling well. He sneezes a lot. His breathing is labored and he's having trouble eating. He's lost a lot of weight. In this adaptation, maybe the wise Big Orange Cat tells Messy that there's a house—over there—where there are some Friends of Cats. We the audience understand that Big Orange thinks Messy may be done for and doesn't know how to help. This is the only thing he can think of. "See if the Friends of Cats can help," Big Orange says.
Messy showed up on our patio. We gave him that name because it was his most noticeable characteristic. He always had leaves and mulch in his fur. He looked thin. He coughed and sneezed and constantly had snot dripping out of his nose. He was friendly and lived on our patio for three weeks.
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My sister—Protector of Cats—told me that he looked rough and that I should catch him and get him neutered. That's what Friends of Cats do. Part of what I like about cats is their independence, and I felt really bad about catching him and intervening in his life. But what am I going to do? Not take the advice of Protector of Cats? I didn't even have to trap him. I just took the carrier outside, offered to pet him with my hand in the carrier and he just walked over and got in. We took him to the vet. The vet fixed him and removed this from his throat.
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So, she fixed him—and then she saved his life. Think, for a moment, how big his throat must be. Think about that polyp in the picture. That's—not good. Messy stayed in our bathroom that night while he was recovering from surgery. He seemed to be doing well. He ate more food that night than I'd ever seen him eat before. The next day, I took him back outside and let him go. He stayed mostly on the porch. Eventually, we opened the door to see if he'd like to come inside. He did. He still goes outside sometimes. He always comes back. He's almost doubled his weight in a little over a week. He's started grooming himself again. He's a good cat.
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