Friday open thread: not your cat

[dolorosa_12]

Today's open thread is sparked by the return of this cat, which has been roaming all over our garden (and all the gardens in this row, and along the roof of our house) these past few days. On Tuesday, a delivery driver knocked on our front door, and the cat, which had evidently been lying in the sun on the front garden's paving stones, dashed into the house, alternating between snuggling around my legs and refusing to leave.

In honour of this incorrigible cat, talk to me about neighbourhood animals who have adopted you as their own.

Comments

[raven]

Downstairs's cat, Blaze, is a GIANT FLUFFY BLACK CAT. She's so fluffy! Anyway I love her, and my partner loves her, and next door love her. A woman down the courtyard has just started dating a handsome Black dude who does the walk of shame a couple of times a week, and she looooooves him. The bin man are very in favour. She was cited in the tenants and management company AGM for her failures in general pest control. She is perf.

[dolorosa_12]

What a good cat!

[senmut]

❤️

[springheel_jack]

Our cat Luna did that. She just showed up in the yard one day, looking hungry, and we fed her, and she then wouldn't leave the immediate area of the deck.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, that's amazing! I'm so glad she found a home with you.

[lirazel]

The first cat I ever loved was my roommate's. Growing up, I thought I wasn't an animal person at all, and I still don't think of myself as "an animal person," but Jamie's cat Hala did teach me that I can love a cat! She was very fluffy and small under her fluff, and she liked to sit on the back of couch above right behind my neck and sometimes she would try to groom me lol. I was not having that, but I did love when she would sit in my lap while I was reading or writing or Tumbling. She died a couple of years ago after a good, long life, and I am thankful that I got to know her!

[dolorosa_12]

I'm not an animal person either (we never had pets when I was growing up) but, bizarrely, cats gravitate towards me. Hala sounds so lovely, and I'm glad you got that time with her.

[peaked]

The Cat Distribution System is at work!

I've never really experienced anything like that because we don't have a lot of roaming animals anymore (we used to a bit back when I was young, but it's frowned upon now). One of my grandparents' last cats followed my mum home from the train station, so she kept her and would walk the street with this cat tucked into her shirt.

When we had an outdoor cat over a decade ago, he would travel the drain system to see his girlfriend, who lived kind of behind us but with a street between the house behind and them. I've been told that he was ill one day, so he was curled up in his basket on our porch. His girlfriend travelled through the drain system to see him, and I think she may have given him a kiss.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, it's a big contrast between the UK and Australia in terms of how much outdoor cats are tolerated.

[trepkos]

The first cat my SO and I owned together was called Faggot. The reason was, he came out of the woodshed, covered in twigs, and a faggot is a bundle of sticks or twigs, and also, we tried loads of normal names on him, and that was the only name that got a reaction. So it stuck. As I say, he seemed homeless, and when we consulted the animal shelter, no one had reported him missing, so we said we'd keep him, and they were happy to let us. He was a beautiful cat - tabby, and he looked like at least part Maine coon. He talked to us a lot, and would take us on walks down our lane. We had him from 1992 to 2008, and the vet thought he was about 3 or 4 when we adopted him, so he lived a reasonably long and mostly happy life.
Our second cat was more stressful in the acquisition. He started coming into the house, having worked out how to get through a locked catflap. We didn't feed him at first but he kept hanging around and sleeping under our cars, so we did start feeding him. But it turned out that he belonged to some people down the road, who only fed him in a shed. His name was "Jackie." We tried taking him back down to them but he actually bit my SO one time when he did that, so we stopped, and just carried on treating him as a guest. Eventually, I was worried about his health, so phoned the owners to ask if we could take him to the vet. It turned out that they were just about to move anyway, and said we could have him. He's only been officially ours for about 3 years, and now he is quite old and has liver problems. I don't think he will be with us much longer.
Both Faggot and Jackie were/are lovely affectionate cats. It will be very odd when we no longer have a cat to come home to.

[dolorosa_12]

I love how your cats found you.

[rmc28]

Our immediate neighbour tamed a semi-feral kitten and named him Mitika (he says it's a Hungarian? diminutive of Dimitrios, and also a comedian back home). Mitika is small, brown, stripey, and quite nervous, but my older child spent long hours being very patient with him in the driveway, and a few winters ago Mitika discovered our catflap. So Mitika comes in and hangs out a fair bit. As of a couple of years ago, Mitika's buddy Biscuit started hanging out too. Biscuit is a big fluffy ginger boy, very friendly. The two of them hang around our driveway a lot in the summer, and in our house a lot in the winter. Biscuit's owners are in the next street down an alleyway.

Mitika and Biscuit have about three braincells between them, and a very sweet, surfbro kind of vibe. In the summer, I often get up at dawn to open up all the downstairs doors and windows and cool the house down while I nap on the sofa and hopefully deter burglars. One memorable summer morning, both cats came in the patio doors and surprised me into sitting up and making a noise. This freaked them both out, and Mitika immediately leapt up on the windowsill at the other end of the living room and out of the window. Biscuit ran out of the living room door, down the corridor back through the house to the catflap, through the catflap into the garden, back into the living room through the patio doors, and then followed Mitika's leap through the window. I had an unstoppable fit of the giggles. Neither of them came back for hours.

I turn out to be mildly sensitive to Biscuit's fur in particular - perhaps because he is just so fluffy - not enough to mind having him in the house, but letting him sleep on my bed is a recipe for gently streaming eyes and sneezes. Naturally, this means he gets into my room whenever possible, and I evict him whenever I find him there. He also likes to curl up on my hockey pads if I leave them on the floor, or leave the kitbag open to air out. (I sent a photo of him in the kitbag to the mixed rec team, and one of the guys immediately replied "not a kitbag, a catbag", which also gave me a fit of the giggles). So my kitbag now stays closed or behind a closed door, or under my supervision, so I don't have a lot of sneeze-inducing ginger fur on my pads at practice.

Both cats like to curl up on the third stair down from the top, and then act mightily miffed when you kick them and complain at them for being furry trip hazards.

[dolorosa_12]

I love everything about this! What fantastic (and dopey) cats!

[morbane]

Biscuit ran out of the living room door...

It's delightful to imagine this whole sequence.

[rmc28]

Honestly still making me giggle when I think about it.

[tellshannon815]

There's a housing estate opposite my old school that has a lot of very friendly cats that I got to know in lockdown - at last count there's Fluffy Doris, Sidney, Lola, Percy, Wilfred, Beau, Hugo, Boo, Scruffy, Jungle, Trouble, Bumble, Bibble, four unnamed kittens belonging to Jungle and Bibble, and two others names unknown so currently known as Hiding Tabby and Hairy Ginge.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, that is a lot of cats!

Lockdown TV

[jesse_the_k]

I'm impressed you could keep all those names straight--did they have tags?

Re: Lockdown TV

[tellshannon815]

They didn't have tags, but I did meet their owners at various points and they told me the names.

[senmut]

When we first moved to where the children now have their home, there was a dilute calico who was quite malnourished who we eventually decided had, yes, been a house cat. Best guess was she had belonged to the house that had burned down the year before we purchased our lot. We named her Turtle (her beiges and creams were reminiscent of a box turtle's colors native to the area, as we were in a sandy loam/pine area). She was very endearing, never tried to go inside (presuming trauma from the aforementioned fire), but had all the manners of an indoor cat.

[dolorosa_12]

She sounds lovely!

[lyr]

There is a very runty possum who now lives in a cardboard box on our patio. I have named her Tilly.

[dolorosa_12]

Amazing!

[morbane]

I am a little wistful: the last bold, friendly cat who behaved in a manner like your tabby's is no longer welcome here, because she will not respect our own cats' boundaries. That is, some neighbours slightly to the north of us have an inquisitive, delightful muted torbie-and-white, and her interest in coming into our house was a comfort in between our last cat and our current ones, but we've had to take our own cats' side in some attempted invasions and awkward standoffs since. I think she may be named Juno.

However! There is also an older pale ginger cat who likes to hang out in the playground visible from our house, and saunter towards any playground users who seem amenable, and submit himself for neck skritches. A most cheering presence during lockdown.

And the undisputed lord of this little section of the street is Hux, a black and white Maine Coon. There is a little pedestrian alleyway that I and many, many neighbours traverse every weekday morning to the shops and bus stop, and traverse every evening too, and that is Hux's territory. You stop and pet Hux, and then you hear someone approaching behind you and so you head off in confident knowledge that the next person will stop and pet Hux. He doesn't seem to be an intra-species bully - my own cats have have perfectly calm interactions with him when he wanders further afield - but I have seen him chastising other cats on occasion.

[dolorosa_12]

It sounds like a whole feline soap opera!

[chestnut_pod]

Mazel tov on your new cat :D?

One half of my complicated in laws set were adopted by a beautiful cat named Sophie. Her owners lived down the street and had actually gone through the immense trouble of bringing her over from South Africa, but Sophie, upon reaching this brave new world, decided she wanted to strike out on her own! She began what seemed like a measured campaign of adoption, starting in my in-laws' yard, then their deck, then the downstairs of the house, and finally the run of the place, overcoming their resistance at every fence. Everyone now agrees that Sophie is [in laws'] cat, not the neighbors, who still live down the street and took this dispossession with surprising equanimity!

[dolorosa_12]

Wow, that's amazing (especially the fact that the neighbours were happy to let Sophie go)!

[corvidology]

All the dogs in our neighbourhood. ALL the dogs.

Like my uncle, grandfather and great-grandfather before me I'm catnip *g* to dogs. Big 'dangerous' dogs like to show me their belly and several of the neighbours are careful when I go out to the car because their dogs will attempt to jump in and leave with me.

No, I do not have a dog. I grew up around a lot of dogs and I know we cannot provide the type of life they really need as we're just gone too much and aren't able to even fence in our garden.

[dolorosa_12]

I love how much dogs love you!

Cats are weirdly drawn to me in the same way as dogs are to you, but similarly I just don't live the kind of life that would suit pet ownership — we travel so much.