Wow, what a crazy busy week! Aside from work and other normal-life business, there's been cat busy-ness too! Lomasi is at the store waiting for adoption. She's done better than I ever dreamed she would going into a strange and sometimes scary environment and owning it, not to mention, making everyone fall in love with her. Bobby is in a store and has some people interested in adopting him.... Bianca is ready to separate from her kittens, dry up, get spayed and go on to her forever home. The kittens are almost old enough to get adopted, but unfortunately two of them have a skin infection and will need to stay a bit longer. The third one, Fintan, is unaffected so we're figuring out how to handle that. Trade and Wind are carrying on along. Wind has a bit of a penchant for peeing where she's not supposed to, but we're working on that too.
Both Trade AND Wind now enjoy human company. Not jump in your lap and cuddle up enjoyment - yet - but when people enter the room, they seek out human attention. In fact, Trade, the little booger, screams at me with his tail in the air in greeting, DEMANDING that I pay attention to him, purring without me even touching him, yet when I tried to pet him, he'd run away... .rinse, lather, repeat. But finally, my husband mentioned the other day he managed to pet Trade, if briefly. . My husband works from home, so he's with Trade more than anyone. I sort of figured if someone made a breakthrough there, it would be him. It seems they have a little something going on, so far be it from me to not take complete advantage of them taking a shine to each other... :)
Then, yesterday, I came into the room, Trade did his usual "PET ME DON'T TOUCH ME" dance, and I'd had enough. I followed him to where he flopped down, and just went for it. He flinched a little at first, but he let me pet him and didn't hiss, swipe, or otherwise discourage it. I scratched behind his ears and gently stroked around his neck and higher on his back, and then got brave and reached around to scratch his chin. A purr erupted from him that sounded like a tractor trailer starting up! We had about a 10 minute love session, and he was finished, but hey, BREAKTHROUGH! Now that I've pet him once, he will tolerate it more often. We had several more short love sessions through the evening. He can only handle so much before his instinct is to nip, but I find that's very common with feral and feral-born cats for the first little while. They are very easily overwhelmed by stimulation they aren't used to, so you sort of have to slowly up the doses over time. After a while they give over to it (or they don't, some cats will never tolerate a lot of petting or handling, not even non-ferals), and then things get easy. Trade is almost ready. Getting him past being a little skittish won't take long now that the barrier is broken. Not that he had ANY problems sleeping ON TOP of my head on my pillow at night (But OHHH NO I couldn't pet him.. grumble). He may already even have a home. Lori has a lovely man who's interested in him, I can get him ready and he will be adopted right away, ideally. Wind will need a little more time. She's VERY small, we felt she probably wasn't quite ready physically for a spay yet.... She had a touch of upper respiratory, and she just had a heat. It stressed her out enough that the respiratory thing kind of went a little further, so she's off to see the vet shortly and we will get her sorted so we can get her spayed. She's doing great too, and was the first to allow us to pet her. She's still VERY scaredy, but I do not see her taking long at all. She really loves pets when she forgets to be scared of people, and she's forgetting longer and more often now. Soon, she will move on too..
Of course, Lori being who she is..... Saw a family at animal control with a mother listed as "feral'. And from the behavior reports, she probably is. With 5 newborns she had at animal control a few days ago. Lori couldn't leave the family there to be sent off to die for no other reason than being feral - And I agree with here. Mama's not going to be scared and overly defensive and protective at ALLLLLLLLLLLLL...... I guess it's always fun to have a challenge, right? Time to invest in some more alcohol, bandaids, and polysporin.. .it's going to be a FUN weekend LOL.
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