Three cats in our home in the last four weeks.
I love cats.
We had two cats after our first dog, Jethro, died when I was growing up — mine was a tubby black-and-white darling we called Blackjack, and my sister’s was a thinner white sweetheart called Kitty, who unfortunately had a case of chronic anxiety where Blackjack had what we might call chronic overconfidence. My grandparents in Greece always kept through the years cats, generally named after cartoon characters — Wellington, Top Cat, Bagpuss, Pilchard, Kipper, Olive Oyl, Kaluki — and apart from those, I was well-familiar with local cats in the cafés and along the beach, like Souvlaki, a very patient and exceedingly muscular tuxedo tomcat.
As a child fishing in Greece, local cats would often follow me around because they knew I would feed them small shrimps and fish I’d caught in the bay; when I wandered the nearby olive grove to my grandparents’ home on the mountain, T.C. would accompany me and generally supervise my activities, including nipping at my calves and herding me back toward the house if she felt I was wandering too far from home. I generally know neighbour cats in different areas I’ve lived in, have been and will ever be a loving and generous uncle to friends’ cats, and am known to wander off or stop midway through a walk because I have spotted a cat and desire to solicit its attention.
I like dogs too, and I do stop and pet people’s dogs and enjoy playing with them, as well as enjoying spending time with family dogs, but I’m not a dog person the way I am a cat person.
One of the reasons I was most excited about moving to Bradford and having my own place was that I would finally be able to have cats of my own — I was quite friendly with some cats in my old home in Galway, especially Pushkin, a big ginger sweetheart with thick white trousers — but neighbours aren’t the same as a feline room mate.
In the meanwhile, as we’ve been on the waiting list to adopt an appropriate creature — there have been lots of kittens around our local rescues of late, and I was very firm about mostly not wanting a young kitten, as adult cats are generally a bit more predictable and a little less wholly chaotic — we’ve made a habit of visiting Bradford Cat Watch Rescue & Sanctuary, one of the closest cat sanctuaries to us that regularly has open afternoons on Sundays, where they encourage people to come in and meet the BCWR volunteers and some of their resident cats.
Katie started Bradford Cat Watch Rescue & Sanctuary after the previous rescue she was volunteering with had to close down — with seventeen cats who had nowhere to go, it was the only option. As a trained nurse, she adapted her skills to work with the cats under her charge, and as time has gone by and the rescue has expanded in its reach, taking on more complex cases, she’s used both her firm sense of justice and focus on animal welfare and her specialist skills to give the best possible care to the cats under the sanctuary’s charge. The rescue recently expanded its intensive care unit, where extremely ill and injured cats recover after they’ve received veterinary care — additional meds might be administered under careful observation, and regularly Katie will stay up the whole night carefully monitoring sensitive cases in the ICU, administering care or performing necessary checks every few hours throughout the night.
BCWR will often coordinate with local emergency services where cats have been injured or put at extreme risk — cats who’ve been hit by cats or otherwise injured through the city, cats experiencing hypothermia or heat stroke because of extreme weather conditions, cats stuck on rooftops or down drains, cats rescued from inside car engines, you name it, Katie has probably seen it and been on-hand to help. These emergency incidents don’t even include animals who are brought to the sanctuary by families who can no longer care for them when they face sudden new veterinary costs or when a cat’s owner becomes too ill or elderly to continue their care or, more frustratingly, cats and kittens who are abruptly abandoned at the sanctuary’s doorstep without warning or care as to the sanctuary’s stretched-thin resources.
In addition to rescuing all manner of cats locally and giving them emergency treatment where they can, Bradford Cat Watch runs a SENSE program in their sanctuary. A good many cats with additional needs, such as chronic illnesses or disabilities, live in the sanctuary with a focus on the environment being Safe, Enriched, Nurturing, and Sensory, where their additional needs are cared for without an otherwise healthy cat being put down.
These are the cats one mostly meets and greets on a Sunday. A few are what the volunteer call “barn cats”, meaning they’re less human-social and don’t like to be petted or handled, or want only a tiny smidgen of it before they’re overwhelmed and want it to stop, but the majority are generally quite interested and excited about human visitors, and will often hop up into laps, say hello, and generally solicit love and affection from their appropriately willing servants. As well as the cats, there’s also Flora, an excitable and darling little spaniel who considers herself the queen of the castle, and three rabbits.
It’s been really nice to make a habit in the past few months of walking the mile and a bit to the sanctuary, especially through the park where we can feed birds and see dogs on the way there and back, sitting down for a few hours and chatting with the volunteers, playing with Flora, or cuddling the beasties, and then coming back.
There are a fair few cat rescue programs in West Yorkshire and many in Bradford, but none of them have a visiting program like BCWR, and unlike certain local cat cafés, which are unfortunately quite poorly run and allow a lot of harassment of their feline inhabitants, especially letting children chase after them, letting them be fed cream or cheese or whatever overpriced stuff from their café menu is least appropriate to the feline digestive system, and generally creating a stressful and upsetting environment for their cats, Bradford Cat Watch genuinely does put their SENSE residents first. BCWR has a clear Kitty Courtesy policy, and it’s actually enforced and taken seriously, not just there for show.
People who are harassing the cats — trying to touch or grab cats that don’t wish to be touched, chasing them to areas where they go to be alone, children especially chasing or running after them — are warned, and then will be asked to leave. The sanctuary takes the cats’ safety and their comfort really seriously, and nothing more obviously communicates that than the fact that their many SENSE residents live in community with one another, are visibly clean and well-groomed, and most of all, are confident and curious about visitors and each other.
Unlike in the worst of the more exploitative cat cafés, where the cats and kittens are often nervous of visitors, often run away from or attempt to burrow or climb to escape from them, hiding under couches or climbing up to runs — and where worst of all, they’re often kept hungry during business hours, so they can be coaxed to where the paying customers are with treats — the cats at Bradford Cat Watch are not just well-socialised, but very obviously sure of their surroundings. They’ll walk up to you and demand pets or climb into your lap — the enterprising Salsa, pictured in one of the above images, has before climbed my jeans and jumper to insinuate herself on my shoulders while I’ve been standing up straight — or they’ll decide they’re less interested in you and walk off in search of another visitor, a fellow feline companion, or just the nearest comfortable napping spot.
Cats aren’t coaxed or tricked towards visitors with food, they’re not pressured into meeting humans if they’re not interested themselves, and in general, they’re allowed to get on with their own lives. In short, visitor’s afternoons aren’t something they have to endure to make a profit — BCWR doesn’t charge a fee for visiting days, nor even charge for pieces of homemade cake, soup, teas and coffees, or any other refreshments they give out to visitors — but are an interesting and fun enrichment opportunity for the cats themselves, if they’re in the mood.
You can and should donate to your local animal rescue societies where you can, but if you’re out Bradford way on a Sunday afternoon during visiting hours, you should absolutely give Bradford Cat Watch Rescue & Sanctuary a visit! Katie is soon to be releasing a book about many of the various characters at Bradford Cat Watch Rescue & Sanctuary, The Funny Looking Cat; one can always bring in donations of things like food, blankets, litter and other resources to the sanctuary itself; they have an Amazon wishlist; and other donation info is available on their site here.
COOKIE
Just past midnight, the date on my phone reading 14/02 when I blearily checked it, my partner woke me up with the best possible news one could hear. “Hey,” he said, shaking me awake and leaning over me. “There’s a cat in the corridor.”
“Wha…?” I mumbled, sitting up and rubbing at my eyes, and I followed him downstairs, put on my slippers, and went out into the corridor with him.
My flat is one of the many conversions in a historical building in West Yorkshire, but rather than the usual conversions of big factories and occasional churches, ours is in what was originally a boarding school when built in 1897, and was later the grammar until they moved campuses. Each flat on this floor has its own door, and once you go inside, there are two storeys — the kitchen and living room downstairs, and up the spiral staircase on a mezzanine floor, the bedroom and bathroom. The mezzanine has a balcony, so the two storeys each share one very tall 12 foot window that lets in a great deal of sunshine on the south-west-facing side like my flat is.
The corridors are not so wide and lofty. A bunch of flats are down this corridor, then through a fire door is a square bit of hall outside of the lift, with two more sets of fire doors leading to the next bit of hall on the floor, and to the stairwell.
This was where we were faced with a dainty calico cat, pressed up against one of the columns and looking baffled about her situation. In order to get to this hall from outside, she must have been let in through one of the doors downstairs, and then would have had to have passed through, at least, two or three fire doors to reach this spot, and at least a set of stairs and/or the lift.
It was a bit too late to be knocking on people’s flat doors to ask if she was theirs, so I got down on the floor and coaxed her forwards. She was a lovely thing, shy but immediately quite friendly, and we patted her head and stroked behind her ears, and then led her down the corridor into our flat, and she stepped inside.
Because we’ve been waiting for the right cat to come up for us to adopt in the area, we already had the basics we needed for a cat — a box of wet pouches, a litter tray — so we set up the tray for her in the bathroom and fed her a pouch, as we knew we’d at least need to keep her overnight.
She was politely disinterested in the contents of a wet food pouch we put down for her, but very engaged with the contents of a pack of Dreamies — though not nearly as interested as she was in the potential contents of my paper bag of fresh cookies, though she was immediately disappointed by the lack of meat or cheese content therein.
Observing her, our new acquaintance seemed faintly confused about where she was, but not at all frightened or anxious. She was genuinely very friendly, had a sweet, chirruping miaow, and was immediately quite cuddly — she rubbed up against our ankles with a friendly tail up high in the air, mashed her little head into our hands, and hopped up onto the bed with us to share in our warmth. She did not seem to have seen a spiral staircase before — not only did the noise confuse and deter her initially, but she seemed very weirded out by the fact that the stairs were backless and that she could see right through them as she ascended or descended them — and in general, she seemed politely confused about most of our flat, about the view from the window, the balcony, about our dishwasher.
Her mild anxiety about the staircase was not enough to deter her from coming up to get in bed with us, and she sat down between us, purring on the blanket. She drooled a little when she purred, but was very solicitous about receiving affection from each of us, and she was an absolute darling, honestly.
We just didn’t understand where she had come from. It seemed very unlikely that she had come from one of the other flats if she was so confused by how the flats were made up — maybe, we theorised, she’d come from one of the flats that was just one storey, or one that had a standard staircase with a wood frame instead of a steel spiral one like ours, that rattles a little? It seemed so much more likely than her having come from outdoors.
In cold weather before, I’ve let a cat in through the front doors of our apartment building — it was snowing, and she looked up at me pleadingly, so I opened the door to let her inside, she stepped in… And then immediately peered around at the lobby, at the post boxes and the fire safety box, and then looked askance at me, as if it was my fault she’d come into an apartment lobby, and it wasn’t the same as being let directly into someone’s front hall. Politely rejecting this strange place, she slipped past me back outside again. She was just a local stray and we’d seen her about before — this new girl was a stranger to us, and she was much, much cleaner, and while she had dirty paws, she seemed far too well-groomed and well-looked-after to be a street cat.
I voyaged out to get a carrier for her the next day, finding a discounted one at B&M for just £3, and that evening, after my partner had finished work, we brought her to the vet’s on the bus. She miaowed quite indignantly at being brought out of doors into the cold, but on the bus, she wasn’t very vocal at all, too interested in all the different people on the bus. When we got off the bus, though, I think she recognised the area, because she started her complaints right up — nonetheless, we brought her into the vet and had her checked for a chip.
She was good as gold, patient with being handled, and excellent news — she had a microchip!
Only the contact didn’t answer when the vet called, and because we were there on a Friday evening, nearly six o’clock, the microchip people had closed and weren’t answering further queries.
“Look,” the veterinary nurse said, “if you’re okay keeping her and you’ve got the stuff to look after her, are you okay taking her home for now? It’s just that if we take her in and no one comes to collect her, not to mention being in the loud environment — “
And we were immediately like, no, no, of course, we’ll just bring her home, she’s no trouble.
We did discover that her name was Cookie, and that she was five years old. I had been a little nervous, palpating her belly, that she was potentially pregnant, but the nurse didn’t mention it, and when a friend of ours from the local cat sanctuary came to check her the next day, she said we couldn’t be certain she wasn’t. With that said, she was in otherwise good health and nick — and frankly, delightful little slag that she was, she ENJOYED having her belly rubbed and palpated, and purred and chirruped away in response to all manners of affection.
After coming home from the vet’s for the first time, she finally peed for the first time in our apartment — cats generally wait for a bit before they go to the toilet in a new place, as they need to build up some comfort and confidence in a new environment before they make themselves vulnerable.
She didn’t generally like to sleep in bed with us at night, but instead preferred to lie down on the floor or on a nearby chair or bed beside us — she was active and excitable, playful, loved batting about different toys and especially loved the feather toy, though unfortunately, she had a habit of not only drooling all over it but chewing and trying to rip off the feathers to swallow them, so we kept having to hide the feather toy or peg it to the ceiling steel beam, well out of her reach, to keep her from grabbing it whilst unsupervised.
In general, Cookie was an absolute delight, and we were more than fine with the idea of keeping her ourselves if her microchip registration turned out to be inactive.
She was very keenly intelligent — I taught her to sit for a treat after only five attempts — and engaged with whatever we were doing. She liked to lie down next to me, lean her cheek into my forearm so we could watch bird videos together on my phone, and while she didn’t generally like to sit in your lap, she liked to lean up against your feet or your legs, and she was very much a social eater and a social toileter.
Apart from liking to come and solicit pets and love whenever I went to the bathroom myself — and showing herself as quite offended when my partner locked her out of the bathroom to pursue their own ablutions in private — she would now and then come and get us to observe as she used the litter box, drank some water from her bowl, or ate from her dish.
In the UK:
– pet cats are required to be microchipped from 20 weeks / four months old, including indoor cats — not having your pet cat chipped is punishable by a fine of up to £500
– cats are considered property, which means that so long as “all reasonable efforts” are made to return them to their rightful owners, they can be considered lost and ownership can be transferred to their finders after a “reasonable time” has passed
I put up posters in our apartment building explaining where we’d found her and saying that she was microchipped but we didn’t know who she belonged to, and while I tried a few times to knock on the nearest doors to where we’d found her, no one came to the door. In the meantime, it turned out that the microchip was not registered to the family that owned her, but instead to a different woman who does local cat rescues — because they insisted that Cookie was a “street cat”, by which I think they meant an outdoor cat permitted to free roam, the microchip went to the rescuer instead of to Cookie’s family, and it seemed that they hadn’t updated their mobile number.
Obviously, as much as we liked the idea of keeping her, we didn’t want to steal her away from her family, so I went along to the address from her microchip and knocked on their door, and when they didn’t answer, decided to come back in the evening.
I noticed that a cat tree had been recently fly-tipped in the area, and because she was so loving and affectionate, showing absolutely 0 interest in going out of doors the five days we’d had her, I was concerned that perhaps they’d tossed her out, especially because the rescuers had said the girl she was registered to must only have been about sixteen.
When I went over in the evening and knocked on the door, it was this girl’s mother that answered, and she didn’t have much English — she initially thought I myself had lost a cat, and when she realised what I was asking, her daughter came downstairs.
“Have you lost a cat?”
“A cat?”
“Are you looking for a cat, have you lost one recently?”
“Oh, Cookie!”
They realised that she’d been gone for several days, but because they thought of her as a “street cat” that free-roamed, I don’t know that they thought to go looking for her, and they hadn’t seen the posts I’d made on local online lost pet groups. Apparently, they met her whilst she was a street cat and she started regularly visiting them when she was pregnant.
Through the local rescuer, they rehomed some of her kittens after she gave birth, and got her spayed. They kept two of the kittens at home, as well as Cookie herself — bless this young girl, but she was mostly concerned about the apparent cruelty of having separated Cookie from her kittens, and I didn’t really have the time to explain that cats don’t have exactly the same issue with separating from their young as humans do.
My main problem was that Cookie had roamed a little over half a mile to make her way to our building, and that half mile was primarily along one of the busiest roads in Bradford, one where cats regularly get hit by cars, and she’d obviously been cold that night and had perhaps gone into the first building she could make her way into, then wandered through the building in hopes of finding an actual place to stay.
She could easily have been stuck in a stairwell all night — she could have been trapped in a less accessible part of the building, got hurt by the lift doors or a closing fire door in her haste to get through and escape, and none of those risks compare to the primary risks of being an outdoor cat in a built-up city. She could have been hit by a car or bus or even a bike; like many cats trying to find somewhere warm in winter, she might have climbed into a car engine or a wheel arch and got stuck or harmed; she might have eaten poison from a local trap set up for rats. The risks are endless.
They were very surprised that Cookie had travelled so far and wandered into an apartment building, and insisted that she was an outdoor cat that didn’t like to be indoors.
I think, as is the case with some cats that “insist” on roaming, that it was less about not enjoying being indoors, and more just that she was lonely and bored when everyone was at work or school, and wasn’t being played with.
I brought Cookie back to her family the next day with a bunch of toys in the carrier that she’d liked best — her favourites were little pompom balls and small mice, and chasing them if you flicked them across the room, barring the feather toy that was her new object of adoration — and they were very surprised at the idea of her playing with toys and liking them, it seemed to me.
“I would try to keep her indoors where you can, especially when the temperatures drop, especially when it’s cold at night.”
“Oh, we try and call her in at night, but sometimes she doesn’t come!”
“I understand, especially when she’s wandering, you can’t control her, she’s her own animal. What I would advise if you can do is to get a box bed or den that you can keep here, in your yard, and line it with straw. That way, if she comes home at night and there’s no one to let her in, she can sleep in that, which will hopefully make her less likely to wander into someone’s house, or into a flat building.”
I then also said that if they felt it was necessary to leave her microchip details with her rescuer, that was fine, but that it was important to keep their contact details up to date, and then texted Cookie’s microchip number to the young woman so that if Cookie went missing in future, they could call up local vets and rescues and ask after her.
My partner and I were obviously disappointed to not keep Cookie ourselves, but when I brought her home and let her out of her carrier in their living room, she was so happy to see the kids there immediately and was rubbing around their ankles, and they were delighted at the fact that their eldest cat had apparently gone off on a jolly for five days and returned with a bunch of new toys.
POPPINS
The Saturday morning after we returned Cookie home, I got a ring from Bradford Cat Watch.
Earlier that week, BCWR had trapped an exceedingly pregnant black-and-white queen that they called Popcorn from inside the Bradford Light Cinema — she’s now popped, by the way, and her kernels are called Nacho, Hot Dog, and Tango Blast — where they were also advised of a black and white cat on a nearby roof. The cat had been up there for a few days, but it was very clear that the cat had multiple safe avenues down and seemed extremely frightened of people, so they left her be.
Even though there were avenues down, though, she just refused to come down, so after ten days of her hiding and rushing back and forth on the roof, Bradford Fire Rescue & BCWR managed to trap her and bring her down, whereupon they brought her back to the sanctuary.
She’d been with them for a few days when they called us, but because of her extreme trauma, she just seemed not to be capable of calming down in the sanctuary environment. She was very frightened of other cats and very nervous of the volunteers too, and in general, the rescue always has quite a lot going on.
“Would you be comfortable fostering her on a sort of unofficial basis — we wouldn’t set the same requirements we do on our regular fosters, and you know that we’re not sure if she’ll ever be genuinely be comfortable with humans at all — and just seeing if she improves in a home environment?”
And obviously, we said yes, immediately, and went to pick her up about an hour later.
Poppins was, from what the vet and the sanctuary could gather, previously a pet, and at their guess, they tossed her out — possibly when she went into heat for the first time, as she still hadn’t been spayed. They don’t know what it was that drove her to climb up onto the roof: it could have been the noise of the city, fear of people, but most likely was a fear of other cats, and especially tomcats who would have been able to smell that she was a fertile queen despite being so young, and would have tried to mount her.
She was absolutely terrified of anything and everything when we went to the sanctuary to pick her up and when we brought her home, so all we did was bring her into the apartment and set her down on her own, her litter box and her dishes nice and close. We put a cloth over the table to create a space for her that was a bit separate from the rest of the room, and then we just left her to it.
Poppins was extremely nervous about being observed by myself or Lorenzo, and would typically only creep out of her covered carrier when we were upstairs and out of sight. You can see from the picture above she was an incredibly tiny little girl, even at only eight months old, and she seemed even smaller in our flat.
She would spend most of the day in her carrier, only venturing out to explore the counters and shelves once she knew we were elsewhere, but she did like to watch us when she could do so covertly, especially from under the cloth on the table.
Once it was night time, though, and we turned off the lights to go to sleep, she began to emit the most pitiful cries — for all she was very frightened of us, she was even more frightened of being left alone again.
The first night, I took a blanket downstairs and slept on the floor, which mostly calmed down her miaows — the next few days, I spent a few hours per day laid down on the floor with her, and bit by bit, she became a little more confident of both me and Lorenzo. She would walk up and sniff me when I was lying still, my feet or my hand, and she would peer a bit more obviously at each of us, especially from the windowsill.
Poppins was also a bit more confident about exploring the downstairs — I was anxious in the first few days that she wasn’t using the litter box, and then realised that she’d been choosing to hide her business in our plastic bag of plastic bags, possibly because her litter box was closer to her bed than she really preferred. After washing all the bags that could be saved and disposing of those that couldn’t, we moved her tray over there, and with that, she was good as gold about using it again — and I set up her bed on the windowsill so that she could get better looks at us as well as look outside at passers by as much as she liked.
On her second-to-last night with us, she knocked her plate down from the windowsill and smashed it. It gave her a shock as well as us, and I felt terrible when I went down very early in the morning to clear up the pieces, because she was very obviously panicked by it, so I moved her bed down again…
But observed that day she seemed a little bit clumsier and less graceful, which in retrospect was perhaps what led to her knocking her dish down. She showed absolutely no interest in her food that day, and my immediate anxiety was of course that perhaps she’d hurt herself as she jumped away from her smashed saucer, or perhaps even that she’d cut her paw or her mouth on a shard of plate, so we kept a very close eye on her.
She threw up, and it was a great deal of yellow bile, and the rest of the day she spent a lot of her time effectively hugging her water bowl, which was just miserable to see. Despite still being so shy and still fearful of us, she was no longer running away from us — she just didn’t feel well enough to, and spent all of her time basically drinking from her bowl, throwing up, drinking from her bowl… and throwing up.
Obviously, we could see that Poppins was feeling very poorly, and we were speaking to her gently, trying to encourage her to eat and drink. What made me almost start crying was the fact that I sat down next to her at her water bowl, reached out to pet her, and for the first time, we heard Poppins purr. She had a very squeaky, high-pitched miaow, but a surprisingly rich purr from such a tiny body, and she even leaned her head into my hand for the pets. She was obviously feeling dreadful, but in that moment, I really do think she trusted that we were trying to make her feel better and she did trust me.
She was still peeing and even pooping a little bit, but her appetite was down to almost nil, and we gave the sanctuary a call to check about bringing her to the vet, so we brought her in the next morning.
The vet checked her over, palpating her abdomen, looking in her mouth, checking her eyes, and said that honestly, she looked okay — there was no sign of any bowel obstruction, no sign of any injury in her mouth. She was obviously a lot more anxious being handled by the vet and veterinary nurse than she was me, but she was given an anti-emetic, and we took her home.
We were told that she was likely to be very sleepy for a few hours, but after she’d slept off the worst of the anti-emetic, to encourage her to eat a little bit. We let her sleep for a bit, made sure she was comfortable and warm, tried to encourage her to eat, but she was still just too tired, so we went upstairs to eat dinner…
And when we came back downstairs to wash up a few hours later, she had passed away in her carrier.
We were absolutely devastated, but by the time I’d gone down to her she’d already started to go a bit stiff at her tail — she must have died soon after we’d gone upstairs, or even had passed away quietly while we were still in the room with her. I wrapped her in the towel she was curled up with and took her back to the vet’s the following morning, returning the second pouch of wet cat food for sensitive tummies we’d not even opened yet.
It later transpired that she had a poor reaction to a routine medication earlier in the week before she’d come to us — luckily, none of the other cats that had received the batch were affected. In Poppins’ case, she was just very small, very young, and very weak after she’d been under so much stress over such an extended period, and the additional hardship on her body was too much for her to take.
We were comforted by the fact that we and the rescue had each done everything that we could for her,and the fact that she was even purring and leaning in to me at the end, when she was feeling so awful, was nice, but also just horribly bittersweet, that she was finally able to get a bit of peace, and then died with us.
TomTom
A little while after Poppins had died with us, I reached out to another local rescue, Little TinCRs, about a beautiful big-cheeked 5-year-old tabby called Booful, but the rescuer advised that he might not be appropriate to our home — Boo was just not going to be suitable for a smaller indoor home like ours.
The rescuer advised, though, that they had another older tomcat who might suit us better. TomTom, at 17 years young, was currently in foster, having been discovered curled up with his deceased owner the month previous, who had sadly passed away in his home. TomTom had had some dental work — removing a few bad teeth — and had also had a few cysts removed from the underside of his throat to be sent off for biopsy, but for all his age was a very active, cheerful gentleman who one could easily be forgiven for thinking was a good deal younger than he was.
Would we be interested, potentially, in fostering TomTom with a view to adopting him, depending on the results of his biopsy?
We were obviously anxious after Poppins had died so unexpectedly with us, but we said yes — I went along to meet TomTom at his current foster home, where I met him as an incredibly cheerful, confident boy of prodigious size and appetite. He was not, we were advised, keen on other cats — although he has a potential brother of uncertain providence who may or may not have shared his previous home with him, Little TinCRs are still trying and failing to capture him — or dogs, and in general was looking for a safe, comfortable, peaceful home to live out his retirement years.
When I met him at the fosterer’s, he was in his own room separate from her other animals, but he was immediately very friendly and confident, although he was unfortunately not happy about the car journey home, and wailed with his beautiful, croaky miaow the whole way home.
TomTom, at five and a half kilos, was a big boy, and the carrier we’d used for Cookie and Poppins was not going to cut the mustard, so we brought him home in a borrowed carrier while I ordered a big backpack to cart him about in online — Little TinCRs was also good enough to provide a big and hefty litter box with tall walls for him, which was more appropriate to his size than the one we had.
Upon being released into the apartment, he was initially shy and uncertain about the space, and especially of all its strange and unusual noises. The house he’d lived in for, we assume, the first seventeen years of his life was only up the road from the woman who’d been fostering him, and apart from being understandably spooked about the car journey here, our apartment has very different noises than a house in a suburb. Apart from being quite uncertain of the spiral staircase and its suspicious metallic rattles, much like Cookie had been, he was very nervous in his first few days with us about noises in the corridors and adjacent apartments — it took him a little while to understand that doors opening and closing, keys rattling in the corridor, people bringing in their shopping, furniture moving, and so on, didn’t mean those people were immediately going to enter our apartment.
With that said, though, he immediately happily took a bit of dry food, and was delighted to be given some dry catnip over a cardboard scratchpad I’d purchased from ALDI the day before.
In preparation for his making his way to us, I’d installed a series of scratching poles and shelves up one side of the wall, so that a cat could, if so inclined, climb up and down between the floors without having to use the stairs — nonetheless, TomTom braved the spiral staircase, and within an hour of being home with us, he was nestled between Lorenzo and I to purr happily away and watch The Good Wife with us.
As of this week, I’ve signed TomTom’s adoption papers, and he’s permanently a resident here at Chez Evans — and his biopsy on the cysts came back as benign, just multifocal trichoblastomas, which come from unusual growth on the hair follicles! His shaved patch of fur has been growing back nicely over the past few weeks, and we’re hoping it will even out soon enough and look nice and healthy.
We quickly learned that TomTom is not necessarily as food-motivated as he initially appeared — what he loves most of all is love and attention, which luckily, he receives in spades from his two new loving fathers, Papa and Pater. Not only are we at his continuous beck and call, eager to hug and kiss and cuddle and wobble him, we keep poking him whenever he’s asleep or looks too still, just to check he’s still breathing, which he does not love, but is remarkably patient with. It’s not his fault our last cat died unexpectedly, nor his fault that he’s so old, but he takes our anxiety in stride.
To be frank, we’re absolutely obsessed with him, and honestly, he seems to really enjoy that. Apart from being such a gloriously large and muscular man with a beautiful big head and beautiful big paws, he’s got a distinctive, croaky miaow that comes out of his throat like a creak from a rusty door, and he is not afraid to use it.
Frequently, Mr Man will approach us with demands. He chirrups when we make eye contact with him from across the room, or when we reach across and touch his back or the top of his lovely big head; he grumbles when we’re still in bed and he’s decided it’s time for us to be up, or when his meal is late, or when he wants to look out of the window and the blinds aren’t open yet, and he can’t be bothered to go and sit on the windowsill where his view won’t be impeded; he yells for food, and for playtime, and cuddles, and kisses, and just because he’s an old man who’s earned his right to yell, and yell he will.
He’s not very interested in springs or rolling balls, nor super interested in little plush toys filled with catnip. What he loves — and I mean loves — is his green worm on a string that one sweeps around with a stick.
This green worm, initially, was fluffy and bright green and had two googly eyes. It is now duller in colour, and is missing patches all over its spineless body, not to mention approximately 20% of its tail. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to eat any of its fur, although I’ve gently removed about four different chunks of his claws, and today, with all the theatrical aplomb of a gladiator finishing a bout in a colosseum, I witnessed our beautiful and awful, awful son wrench the googly eyes from the worm’s body with his teeth and spit them about a foot and a half across the room.
He fucking loves this green worm.
The dangly toys we bought let you exchange out different toys with clips to the end of the wand — a fish and a mouse with ribbon tails, spare worms (luckily), and a tail of brown and pink feathers. He quite likes the fish and mouse toys, although not as much as he loves the worm, and we’re obviously glad to have spare worms for when this one finally dies a death — the feather tails he’s strangely cautious of. He loves to watch that dangler move back and forth, but he doesn’t like to touch it with his paws, and he keeps leaning in to sniff it and then make a stinky face about it — I think perhaps he’s not keen on the texture of the feathers.
We transitioned TomTom over to a new wet food with us, and as an elderly boy, I will unfortunately say, he produces some nuclear bowel movements and awful farts to match, but when you bury your nose in his fur, he has that lovely clean smell that most cats have. We’re still working out the appropriate dosage of food for him — he’s lost a bit of weight with us, which the rescue were hopeful he would do, but he’s taken a little time to actually finish his plates, and when he leaves his wet food, it dries out a bit, whereupon he doesn’t want to eat it, because it’s gone dry.
This is our fault, obviously, when it occurs, and the fact that we top up his wet food with a bit of water rather than simply providing him with an immediate fresh batch is cruelty and neglect of the highest order.
Apart from that, someone was good enough to send over a puzzle ball from our cat wish list, and TomTom uses it religiously, every single day. I fill it with his favourite dry biscuits, as well as mixing in some biscuits that are good for his dental health, and throughout the day and night, he comes back to it. He bats it neatly around, he eats a few biscuits, he bats it around some more, he walks away, he comes back.
I’m obviously going to get him some more different puzzle toys, as I take enrichment for indoor cats very seriously and I know that it’s good for any animal to work up an appetite by doing some exercise or thinking to get hold of it — what’s excellent is that TomTom demands playtime before he eats any of his wet food, loves to exercise before he tucks into his meal, and that’s great! It’s good that that’s his instinct! I think I might get him some lick mats, especially given that because of his teeth, he tends to push his food around his plate quite a bit — I’m also thinking of getting him different puzzles that encourage him to use his head and his paws to work for his dry food.
A more difficult battle has been getting the boy to drink water. Like many old men, he does not want to drink water, and frankly, he feels condescended to that you would even suggest it.
Another gift someone bought from our wishlist was a water fountain with cute little daisies on it — many cats don’t love to drink from still water sources, and prefer running water. TomTom is not one of these cats. He thinks the machine is deeply suspicious, and he doesn’t trust its movements nor its design.
We think he’s drunk from it once or twice, but we’re not actually certain — it’s got a carbon filter in it! It’s good!
It is one of several water sources I keep out for him around the house — one is a dish of water we keep next to his food bowl, which we know that he drinks from because we’ve found cat hairs and bits of jelly in it; another downstairs with toy fish in it, which he likes to watch if I bat them around, but thinks the idea of his getting his paws wet by batting them about himself would be ridiculous.
In the first few days of staying with us, he tried to hop up into my rocking chair, and he was absolutely horrified when it had the gall to move underneath him, immediately tipping him onto the floor. This biased him against the chair for a day or so, but then he braved it again, and he’s now quite dexterous in hopping into and out of the chair, especially if I’ve recently been sitting in it and he gets to leech up the warmth I’ve left behind. Unfortunately, he also regularly gets static shocks from the white fur blanket I keep on that chair, but this seems to be a price he’s willing to pay.
In his time with us so far, we have absolutely spoilt him, have no doubt about that.
I’ve set up a large hippopotamus plush which doubles as a floor cushion, and put one of my shirts over top of it, which he likes to sleep on and sunbathe on; last week, I saw an adorable pink bunkbed intended for dolls, but perfect for elderly men.
In the mornings and the evenings, when it’s time for us to wake up or time for us to go to sleep, TomTom loves to hop up and into bed with us. He’s not much of a lap cat, especially not when it comes to my lap, as I’m unfortunately on the skinnier side and he’s a hefty lad, but he loves to climb into bed alongside us and press his body up against our chests or our backs with his head on the pillow beside us. I’ve been battling a case of shingles this week, and while I’ve been in a good deal of pain and discomfort, he’s loved it. He likes to be under the blankets where the other men are, and he loves to love.
I’ve been asleep in bed a lot, and I’ve even been a little bit feverish. That’s great for TomTom.
His favourite way to sleep is to stand over you until you move your hand so that your palm is facing upwards, and then he nestles his big fat cheek and his big heavy head right in your palm, so you’re cradling his head the whole time. He slept like that with me the whole night last week, and kept shifting his position but keeping his head in my palm the whole time.
He likes it when I hold him more like a toddler, one hand supporting him from under the arse and the other on his shoulder, and rock him while kissing his cheek. He likes it even more when I pick him up around the middle and dangle him upside down — whenever I do that, he purrs like it’s the best thing since sliced bread, and it’s genuinely adorable, especially when it’s such a silly thing to do to him. He also loves it when Lorenzo cradles him like a literal actual baby and sings to him, “He’s a baby boy, who’s also an old man, he’s a baby boy old man, old man who’s a baby boy…” and so on.
Sometimes, if you’re petting him with one hand and not the other, he’ll reach out with one of his big paws and haul the lazy hand toward him. Sometimes, he just grabs hold of your hand and hugs it against his beautiful soft chest, which he loves to have rubbed. In general, I have never known a cat so patient and so comfortable when it comes to having his paws gently held or manipulated, and he’ll actually reach out to rest his paw on your hand or on your thigh if you’re sitting with him. He just likes to hold hands!
He loves bird videos and he likes it when there are chipmunks, but if a squirrel comes on screen he’ll turn around from the television and complain at me, because he vaguely understands that I control the nature videos I put on the television, and therefore I should have some manner of directorial control over the content of those videos, and he doesn’t like squirrels. When not watching videos that are intended for cats, he quite likes David Attenborough documentaries, especially ones about monkeys and other small mammals — I tend to put documentaries on for him before we leave the house, and if I come back home and the television has timed out, he makes sure to make his displeasure known with this state of affairs.
I’ve built a huge cat tree for him that runs alongside the shelves I built into the wall, and I also removed one of the narrow glass panels in our balcony to make traversing the wall a lot easier.
In general, TomTom does think this whole thing smacks of some sort of conspiracy to trick him into doing exercise, but he does now use the wall from time to time to go downstairs of his own accord, especially if he’s interested in looking out of the window; while he doesn’t care for the top tiers of his cat tower, as he think he gets a bit nervous when he’s too high up, he really likes two of the boxes of it. For all he’s hale and hearty for his age, and doesn’t show any signs of arthritis — he properly runs when you pull a string in the right way — he isn’t always the most graceful when hopping down from a height, and it makes him quite cautious about climbing, and even more cautious about getting down. When he hops down even from the kitchen table, it’s sometimes with the force of a fucking meteor.
Obviously, when working with rescue cats — especially when fostering — there comes the good with the bad, but despite how sad we are to have lost Poppins, we did our very best for her, and we’re glad to have had a much better outcome in getting Cookie home to her family, as well as to have brought TomTom into a loving forever home with us.
Little TinCRs are still going to see if they can capture his maybe-maybe-not brother, who they’ve heard a lot of conflicting stories about — they don’t know if his ginger brother was indoor-outdoor or wholly outdoor, or how friendly he and TomTom are with one another, or how people-friendly his ginger counterpart is at all. The plan is, if they can capture him and get him de-nutted, we’ll reintroduce them and see if they seem comfortable and into one another, in which case, we’ll be more than happy to take on his sibling as well — it’s an indoor flat, but there’s obviously a good deal of vertical space for a more energetic boy to traverse, and by the time they manage to trap him, let alone get him spayed, I expect we’ll have even more toys and enrichment about the place.
If this home doesn’t seem suitable — if he and TomTom doesn’t get on, or if an indoor flat or just a home with humans in — doesn’t seem appropriate, then we’ll support him getting fixed up somewhere else, and in the meantime, we’ll keep on loving on our new adoptive son, as well as petting every other cat we see around West Yorkshire and supporting our local rescues.
I feel so very lucky to finally have our own beast to love on and dote on, and we’re hoping he has many more years ahead of him to spend being spoiled by his loving dads.
In such a small space, we can’t devote more time and space to fostering cats ourselves, but my intention is absolutely to keep devoting time and energy where I can to supporting and sharing my local rescues, and I absolutely encourage you if you can to do the same!
The end goal is always lost animals making their way home, like Cookie, or fosters finding their way to a new permanent home, like TomTom with us — sometimes the best we can do is to give animals a loving and safe home at the end of their lives, as was unfortunately the case with Poppins, but that work is still worth doing, and does make one animal’s life better toward the end, easing their suffering rather than adding to it.
I’ve of course mentioned Bradford Cat Watch & Sanctuary and Little TinCRs, which are local amongst others here in Bradford, but if you can devote time as a volunteer or a fosterer in your local area, see if you can; if you can’t donate time or money, you can always donate litter, food, or other resources to local fosterers.
It’s hard, tough work rescuing any animals, emotionally exhausting but often not given much support from the state or bigger charities, but it’s work done out of love and care and really worth doing — and worth appreciating, where we can!
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