Mr. Boots

March 7, 2008 -

On the last day of my spring break, I hap­pily got up early to go fill in on Clean & Feed at Good Mews — I’d been miss­ing my Fri­day morn­ing ladies! After greet­ing Con­nie, Char­lene, Patty, and Karen, I popped my head into Intake to say hello to the new res­i­dents. Almost all the cages were full because we’d been the recip­i­ent of an influx from yet another hoard­ing case, though at least this time the kit­ties were still in pretty decent shape. When I got to one of the bot­tom cages, I gasped. The cat in there looked star­tlingly like Iris! The only major dif­fer­ence was gen­der — this was a big fluffy boy cat. He was one of the intakes from the hoarder, and had been there less than 24 hours so we knew essen­tially noth­ing about him except for his name. I took time out to get acquainted and give him some good snor­gles, which he grumpily assented to.

As I cleaned the iso­la­tion room, I kept slip­ping back into Intake just to look at him and coo at him, in addi­tion to dis­cussing him with the shel­ter staff. At one point Dana told me that he is front declawed, which sent chills up my spine –Iris was front declawed when we got her.

I told DH about Mr. Boots and intro­duced them the next day, and kept going by GM every day or two just to visit him. It became clear that he was meant to be our cat, so even though he wasn’t fully vet­ted out yet, we went over the fol­low­ing week­end to put him on hold.

It took a month because of some health con­cerns, but at the begin­ning of April Shan­non and Dana said that if I could give him the shots of the med­ica­tion he was on, he could come home now. Oth­er­wise it would be another two weeks. Hey, I prob­a­bly need to learn to give kitty injec­tions any­way! So Dana showed me how, and he came on home. I put him in his “safe room” away from the oth­ers and went out to run some errands.

Three hours later I came back, and there he was at the door, look­ing for all the world as if he was say­ing “Okay, I’ve checked this room out and it’s fine. What else do I have here?” So I let him out to explore the rest of the house and meet Sarah and Dono­van (and get the req­ui­site hiss­ing over with).

Nap­ping with Mom

Since then he has become our “Zen Cat.” He loves watch­ing TV with DH, and has learned the word “snor­gles” quite well. Like all our cats, he is a “prox­i­mate cat,” gen­er­ally want­ing to be near us no mat­ter what is going on.