We already had two cats, but I felt like we
needed another one for some reason. My wife loved animals and I felt like it would give her a
little more company. I've found that pets can be great friends and companions, and our two other
cats had already proven themselves to my wife.
Our cat Tabby had proven himself over and over as
a companion. Claudia has terrible asthma (and no, she's not allergic to cats, thank god), and
whenever she had an attack Tabby would hover over her, sleep with her and just be there. Once when
she had a very had attack he came running out, almost as if to tell me something was wrong, and
forced me to come into the bedroom to check her out!
I
decided to get her another cat, and concluded the best thing to do was to go to the Humane Society
to pick one out. This was more difficult than I expected, as they are very choosey about who gets
their animals. They wanted to be sure that we would provide a good home and not just abandon the
animal after a few weeks or months. They even needed a note from our landlord saying it was okay
to have animals in the apartment! I kind of felt like we were adopting a child and not a kitten.
Finally we got through all of the red tape and
the big day arrived. We climbed into the car and went down to the Humane Society building, then
proceeded directly to the cat area.
There were dozens of cats, but most of them were
older. We specifically wanted a kitten, which made it more difficult. Kittens go fast and there
were very few of them left. It was kind of heart breaking also, as the older cats were charming
and happy and wanted to be loved, but we just didn't want an older cat.
We were getting frustrated and were close to
giving up when one of the cats noticed me. It was an orange tabby cat. She was meowing at me
loudly, almost appearing to demand that we take her with us. We feel in love immediately as we had
found out cat.
A
few days later we took home our new kitten, naming her "Buttercup". She proved to be a terror,
shredding everything in sight.
One day Buttercup decided that she was terrified.
Everything scarred her. As near as we could tell, she had bitten into an electric cable or
something and just became afraid of everything. She was fine physically, but watching her walk
around the living room was very amusing. She would cautiously circle a shoe as if it was a
dangerous animal, then jump five feet in the air if something moved.
Buttercup also became terrified of the floor at
night. She refused to jump off the bed, and had to be carried from the bedroom to the food bowl.
There were a couple of times that she jumped into the air to come down claws first on my arm,
requiring lots of band-aids and antiseptic.
In the couple of years since, Buttercup has
slowly lost her terror of everything and settled down to be an almost normal cat. She is still a
bit jumpy but otherwise, she's fun and happy.
