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Long-Running Cats…
by Paul McGoldrick
It is probably a little hard for people who know me now to believe that I was once a really cute altar boy. By the age of six I was getting up early to ride my bike into the community of Lewisham in South London to serve at 7 AM Mass. I was always sober, the priest wasn’t: a situation not helped by the altar wine (which tastes like very bad sherry, by the way – don’t ask). Until the dog day happened. A dog chased my bike and I fell off. Ten stitches later, I was a dog hater.
I got over my fear of dogs to the point that when an erstwhile Polish sister-in-law had an Alsatian that wanted to take some meat out of me, I terrorized him to the point of making him back through a cat flap in her kitchen door.
But, cats? They have always been a delight. When I was teaching at college in the South-West of England I had a cat that loved to travel in the car with me. She knew exactly where she was and about five miles from home she would be on the passenger seat with her paws on the dashboard watching out for her neighborhood. We had a lot of hedgehogs in our Cornish home and she regularly got freaked out when they wouldn’t play with her. Solution when they rolled up in a ball? Continue the rolling...into the pond…
Then when I lived in Shropshire I had maybe ten cats (plus sheep, but that is another veterinary story). They bred to the point where I had over twenty-five of the moggies. One of the queens was eating her own kittens, otherwise there would have been many more! To stop this continuing expansion of the feline population I caught all of them and put them in a garbage can and took them to the vet. That evening I returned with this wonderful mass of fur in the bottom of the can – which had been thoroughly disinfected by the staff. Never smelled a garbage can that good, before or since.
During that period I had a brother-sister combo who would hunt squirrels together. One would chase the squirrel into the path of the other. Result? Dead squirrel, the nastier parts of which would end up as a present on my doorstep later on. One day the girl disappeared and the boy died a couple of weeks later from what I would, medically-incorrect, call a broken heart.
I also had a Siamese boy who developed the habit of jumping on my shoulders from a second floor landing when I came in the front door. The first time that happened – in the dark – was terrifying. One day I was hosting a dinner party (still a popular activity in the UK, but with the food now mostly coming from the instant food racks in Tesco or Sainsbury’s) and I was preparing a full salmon. The only place that I could cleanly head and tail this fish was on the back stone stoop. I put the fish down, turned around for my knife, and the fish was gone, flopping to either side of the Siamese’s mouth. He took the fish to the roof of an outbuilding and ate what he wanted while all the other cats kept their distance below, against his insistent hissing. When he finished they were all over the remains.
 I have had little success bonding with male cats since then. My alpha-male tendencies, I am told, as well as little tolerance for being yowled at in "feed me now!" tones in the pre-dawn hours. But we have had one little guy named Apollo for a few years and he is now sick. Don’t get me wrong. I fully believe that one of the reasons why we bond with pets is that we last longer. We are able to look after them through their entire life cycles; they don’t have to look after us, although they do.
Apollo is a dapper black guy who looked after a sister – also part of our family – when a bunch of dogs, egged on by teenage boys, destroyed their mother and siblings at a campground in Oregon. You may remember him for his online doctorate in Exercise Science, detailed in a previous editorial. He has now lost the use of one kidney and the other isn’t doing too good. One of my now-daily tasks is to get fluid into his system under his skin, and although it is quite traumatic – for me – it is a task of love. The rebound after hydrating is quite remarkable.
 But, at the same time, things look up. A boy kitten and sibling were, literally, thrown out at a trash dump. This last week we have adopted said kitten. The Victoria Pet Adoption Society is a volunteer-run operation that takes adoptions very seriously. Apart from checking out new adopters in detail, they have policies that state no pet adopted after October 25 will be released to his/her new home until November 2 (particularly important for black cats like ours), and absolutely no adoptions over the Christmas holidays. The VPAS keeps cats for adoption at our local Shaw Animal Hospital, an operation remarkable for having a vet on duty until 1 AM every day (and after that one is on call) and 24/7 staff on-site.
The integration of the new kitten who started off life as black but has turned smoky has been remarkably smooth. Yes, the spray bottle has had to be employed, but after his first hours of total elation at being free from the kennel at last, he has adopted a more laid-back life. The VPAS named him Teeny Tim. For us he is Timbit, after the donut holes from the ubiquitous Canadian Tim Horton's.
Nine lives, indeed.
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