Fonzerelli Fuzzlenuts is a short-haired white male. He’s a super-friendly people-person, who just loves snuggling. He was barely a year old when he came to us. He’s very well-mannered, both with humans and with other cats.
We first saw him outside, and he walked towards us, “talking” at us, when we called to him. On the 3rd day, he walked right in our enclosed porch for us and begged for lovin’. We figured by the rather strong aroma, and his apparent young age, that he’d probably been dumped because it didn’t occur to his previous owners that a little trip to the vet and a quick snip-snip would eliminate that nasty odor…they’d rather almost literally throw him to the coyotes, than get him neutered. There are spay & neuter clinics and such, some of them mobile units; training for up and coming young veterinarians, for instance, that can cost barely $40 for a neuter. They just need a bit of research to find when and where they take place near you. We’ve had coyote packs with as many as twenty members in this area, and they love to eat cats! Just dumping them out in the wild will end up with them dead! We tried to find his owner for almost a month, just in case he’d simply escaped on them and the new influx of hormones had sent him wandering, before we went ahead and had him neutered. He wasn’t starved enough to have been traveling all that far, as indoor cats rarely have the first clue about the mechanics of catching your own dinner; and none of our neighbors recognized him (in the country, there’s usually a mile or more between most houses, so we didn’t have to check with all that many people).
He went through a faze, thankfully short-lived, where we nearly re-named him “Pig-Pen”. Dirt baths are actually good for a cat’s fur; when they are finished grooming the dust out of their coats, it’s like they’ve had a luxury spa bath with a very expensive shampoo and conditioner. The problem is, they let off a literal dusty little cloud with each movement, until they groom it off! And Fonzie wasn’t satisfied until he’d had a solid week of rolling in as much dirt and dust as he could find.
Fonzie had to have been a house-cat before he came to us, and not a barn-cat; he was much too familiar with the intricacies of house life–opening doors, the most fun pathways over the top of furniture to avoid touching the floor, the fun of water faucets, what comes from refrigerators, the joy of nicknack rearrangement; sleeping through the use of a shop vac as a feline brush… He’s one of the ones who likes to be vacuumed with the hose-brush. He was a little startled at all the other strange cats wandering around, but it only took about a week before we could trust him loose with the others without expecting mass mayhem and bloodshed. Now it’s just moderate mayhem and wobbling furniture. Since the vast majority of our colony is seniors or near-seniors, he’s only got a couple of willing playmates–mainly Clancey Too and Yonkers. It can be interesting when he mistakes one of the more “mature” cats for one of his playmates; some do look quite similar, if you’re not paying attention. They usually don’t take well to Fonzie’s “requests” to play–not that I blame them, as he enjoys the pounce method of asking. Luckily Fonzie isn’t a super-alpha type, and will easily back down the instant somebody gives him what-for when he Bothers Them.
He seems to have some of the most interesting sleep poses! He could probably sleep through an explosion, too, so long as you don’t pick him up–in which case he simply shifts around to hug you, and if you don’t hold him very still, playtime begins again.
She came to us after she’d been hit by a car. She was only maybe four to five weeks old, and an owner was never found–she was probably a stray. The lady who rescued her took her to a veterinary hospital that was considerably over-priced, and quite obviously more concerned with their profit than the care of the creatures brought to them. They’d wanted this good Samaritan to fork over more than three thousand dollars to perform surgery on the kitten, whose hip was broken in three places. A set of the most horrible x-rays we’d ever seen, a poorly bandaged leg (the bandage extended to twice the length of the kitten’s leg!) and a single night’s stay had our friend’s bill already over eight hundred dollars–all for rescuing a stray!
At one point early on, as her leg had Meow’za pretty much incapacitated–we even had to hold her upright in the litter box!–we got creative, and put together a little wheeled cart-type thing of duct tape, dowels and casters for her to use to get around. It even had a little “seat belt” so she wouldn’t pop out of it. Not exactly the most artistic of creations, but she seemed to like it. She could zip around in it pretty quickly!