Puffy, Mr Bond & Reverend Jim Companions to WereBear. Website: The Way Of Cats - wayofcats.com/blog  Puffy, the Greta Garbo Cat. I got Puffy from a Christian biker filmmaker, who was in despair over this little ball of fluff finding a home like his littermates. He was extraordinarily shy, and by the time I socialized him, I had concluded the process would be even longer and more difficult for his next home, so he shouldn't go any further.  Bond. James Bond. Mr. Bond is a Norwegian Forest Cat mix. Caution is his middle name. I got him in the first place because he was so shy and careful about new things. He was one of a litter dumped in a cardboard box at a pet store I used to frequent. The pet store put the kittens in a cage by the cash register in an attempt to get new homes for them. Three cats went quickly. But not this kitten, who was there day after day, squashed into a corner of the cage, eyes wide in fright. “No one can cuddle him,” I was told. So, nobody wanted him. I thought he was only semi-feral, judging by the quick acceptance of his littermates. So I took him out, calmed his struggles, and convinced him, with slow blinks of my eyes, that I was his friend. I triumphantly took him back to the cashier to show how cuddly he could be. But when I tried to transfer him to the teenager's arms, I realized I had tripped him, all right. He was sweet and cuddly. But, as it turned out, only with me!  Reverend Jim, the Goofball. Reverend Jim, aka RJ, is our kitten. He's just a year old now, but since he looks and acts so much Maine Coon, the largest domestic cat, I'm confident he will be our kitten for three more years. They are slow to come to full maturity. In RJ's case, it can seem considerably longer. But it's not his fault. He was being held as evidence in a police case, having bounced around various shelters for most of his four months, for what we can only assume was extreme neglect, since the only way I could tell he was a long-haired cat was the tufts in his ears. He had reached out through his cage bars and patted me on the face, and I got to work, calling the police department and getting the officer in charge of the case to spring him. Twenty four hours later he was on his way home. |
