Loving a Cat

Copperfox

Copperfox

Well-known member
I grew up (in a small city) as a dog person. I didn't hate cats, but I preferred the obvious love given by a good-natured dog. In all of my life until recently, there have only been two cats whom I "owned" in any sense. They were family cats, first a male and later a female, coming before I got married to my first wife Mary. We had Patrick, with gray and white fur, during my transitional years from child to teenager. We had Fiona, all gray, roughly during my college years.

In full adulthood, it was all dogs again for me. The last dog I had was called Angel, and I shared her with my second wife Janalee (of whom T.D.L. members have heard in the past, especially when Aslan summoned her to join my Mary Further Up and Further In). Only in autumn of last year did a cat come officially under my care again: that is, under my and Wood Nymph's care. This ties into a prayer need.

A very sweet female cat named Hope, similar in color to the late Fiona, belongs to my first boarder, an elderly lady named Ardis: like my Mary, a former nurse. Ardis, unlike me but very much like Wood Nymph, is a lifelong cat lover. Until October, Ardis needed no help with looking after Hope the cat; but on October 19th of 2021, Ardis was hospitalized with Covid-19. Despite never having been vaccinated, and despite being older than myself, she recovered completely from the Covid..... only to have a doctor discover that she had a very serious cancer. So at least having Covid resulted in her cancer being revealed. The obvious prayer is for Ardis NOT to die of cancer; but a request for Hope is coming up.

For nearly four months now, I've been learning to understand Hope's behavior, likes, dislikes and quirks. Wood Nymph often explains details of kitty-ology, based on her extensive past experience with the critters. I now get along well with Hope the cat; but her thyroid gland isn't getting along with her. Hope the cat suffers from a life-threatening thyroid malfunction, for which we have to give her pills twice each day. The poor little sweetie SO DOES NOT enjoy this procedure; but an intriguing invention helps us get the job done. Who knows what a pill gun is? It's a thing like a syringe, only with no needle; it literally shoots a pill into an animal's inner mouth.

After each time she suffers this indignity, Ardis' cat eventually "forgives" us for the offense. Next month, however, Hope will need an in-patient iodine treatment for her thyroid gland. Hence the self-explanatory feline prayer need.

I am reminded of a verse from Proverbs twelve: "The righteous man has regard for the life of his beast." .
 
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Aw, thank you for taking care of Hope the Cat. She sounds lovely. I am praying she, and Ardis, will be OK.
 
Of course, you have me as a resource for anything cat-related as well.

I currently have two cats, male Desert Lynx breed, named Palu and Lukan. (Taken together, their names spell 'Palulukan', the Na'vi name of the Thanator creature from the movie 'Avatar'.) They have a little bit of bobcat in them, and they are crazy!

'Freeway', the last cat from my last batch of cats, died on January 9th, 2017 just after the beginning of the 'Week from Hell', during which I got stranded on a mountaintop in a snowstorm (in a warm transmitter building, thankfully), nearly killed in a spin-out on the highway the next day, and being called in to take over satellite operations on a live basketball game production when the visiting engineer slipped on the ice (from the same storm) and broke his hip. At the end of that week, Kenya the lion (the lion in my avatar) suddenly dropped dead in front of me, on the day before my 56th birthday. Because of the weather, Freeway hadn't been buried yet, so he ended up being buried with Kenya, and two petting zoo deer that were also awaiting burial for the same reason. So, they have a posthumous food supply as well!

Many people consider cats as the epitome of independence, and they certainly can be. But they can be intense lovers as well. And no cat will love you more than a lion, or maybe a liger.
 
For the benefit of those who don't know: a liger is to a lion and a tiger as a mule is to a donkey and a horse.

But speaking of animal heredity, I hadn't realized that bobcats and lynx were genetically close enough to interbreed.
 
Oh, and if those two deer are expected to serve as food in the afterlife, it would have to be under conditions like Thor's goats in Scandinavian mythology: once eaten, they spring back to life, intact.
 
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