Schenectady Synecdoche

oh, goodie! I can't wait! Whatever will Geraldine do?

She'd better check with her astrologer and her therapist, I think, cuz if we're successful with Fred, Geraldine will be the next project.

I'm excited to see how the new addition to the family does :-)

We've actually successfully adopted a feral before—our first cat, Killer. A beautiful white calico, about 6 months old when she found us. She wouldn't let us near her for several years. We broke down her defenses by petting her while she was eating. Eventually she became an incredibly loving, trusting friend.

Fred, OTOH, is not young. (I'll be very interested to see what the vet says about his age.) And he is not desperate to get into our house, as Killer was (even though she didn't want to be touched). But he is very much oriented to us and increasingly curious and trusting. So we'll see how lucky, patient, and skilled we are with this one. We figure at the very least we'll be able to neuter and release, and that's a fine thing to do with a feral who won't domesticate. But I think he will. I think he will. I think he will.

I'm thinking that you'll soon have another trusted house cat. Fred sounds like he realizes that he's got loving pets in his future. As a former cat owner I was always strangely aware that I was the one who was the well trained pet in that relationship :-)

LOL. Yes, BP and I have been carefully trained for 25 years by 3 generations of cats. We're ready to serve Fred's every whim and abide by his every rule.

We've taken in two feral cats. One had been abandoned (or its mother had) in a state forest, and had survived the winter there alone. We first saw it in a tree, by moonlight, yowling - caught it in a live-trap with tuna, took it to the vet for shots, and it became our daughter's best friend. Adric never fully became an indoors cat, and was killed by a car, crossing a road to hunt mice in an empty barn.

Rudyard Kitling was a stray at the Apple Festival farm one exceedingly cold Jan, and was determined to come inside a house full of very allergic, feline-phobic people. We again did the rescue, but immediately found a foster home - which brought the cat back in a few weeks, because it beat up the other cats in the house so badly. He bit people as well, and was spooked by everything. He's a honey now, loves sitting on laps, and curls up daily with our daughter's cat, an ocecat (sp?) for naps. One very important tool for helping him calm down (taught to us by the foster-owner, who'd done a lot of cat-psych research) was "kitty jail". When he couldn't handle himself, was too spooked by noise and people, and began attacking, a laundry basket upended over him gave him a safe place to calm down - he could look out, but not touch or be touched.

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