Angel's story---from poor start to happy home!
Angel is now a healthy, happy adult cat, 3 1/2 years old, and weighing about 10 pounds:
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The way her life started out, it didn't seem very likely that she would even survive, let alone live to adulthood:
Angel was born around the 1st of July, 2001, on a farm near St. Paul, Nebraska. (Her people were the parents of one of my co-workers.) She and her two siblings were found by her people around the middle of August that year, a day after their mother was found, dead, killed by a coyote or something. My co-worker took Angel and her two siblings to her house, and bottle fed them until they were old enough to eat canned food. It was a miracle they even survived.
When we brought Angel home to live with us on August 31, 2001, she was very, very tiny. We had never been around little kittens, so had no idea how tiny she actually was for an 8-week-old kitten. At her first appointment with the Vet. on Sept. 1 that year, she weighed only 8 ounces, and was the size of a 2-week- old kitten. She had worms, so we got some medicine for her for those, and she started growing. (She went through three courses of de-worming medicine before she got rid of them all.)
When we found out for sure that our new little kitty was a girl, we named her "Angel" because of her color, which was almost all white at the time. We also thought the name signified her survival against the odds. And when the 9-11 attacks occurred, her name held even more significance for us. It was a nice relief to be able to come home from work and play with her, and watch her in all of her angelic innocence and curiosity. She helped us tune out all of the evil in this world, if only for a little while, as we played with her and videotaped her in all of her antics. But we soon learned that she doesn't always live up to her name!
We have two dogs, Sandi and Oreo, and we were concerned about how they would adapt to having a little sister, in the form of a kitten, added to our household. We introduced them to each other gradually, putting Angel in her little carrying kennel every evening and placing it down where Sandi and Oreo could sniff and look at her without actually hurting her. We told them they had to be nice to her, and they learned that they wouldn't be allowed to eat her.
The first time Angel actually met Sandi and Oreo in person, she walked right up to Oreo, sniffed noses with him, then reached up and batted his nose with her paw! Then she walked right past Sandi, to their water bowl, and took a drink from it. Sandi just looked at her, and Angel has been the "boss" in our home ever since!
She likes to tease Oreo, especially, by running past him and batting at his nose, or ears, or tail, or feet, etc., etc., etc. She also likes to move Sandi's and Oreo' water bowl across the kitchen floor, away from their food area, and then take a drink out of it.
She loves water, and will come running whenever she hears us drinking water from a water bottle, or running the faucet in the kitchen, or taking a shower. She always jumps up onto the back of the chair and sits and licks my son's hair if he goes and sits in the recliner after taking a shower.
She loves to play fetch, and will often initiate this game by bringing whatever object she wants to fetch over to me, jumping up into my lap, and dropping it in my lap. I'll throw it, and she'll leap out of the chair and go running after it. If it goes into the kitchen, she'll usually slide right on by it because the floor is so slick. Then she'll attack it, and throw it up in the air a few times, and bat it around, and stalk it, etc., etc., etc., until she brings it back to me and we start the game all over again.
The only time she ever hisses and/or growls at anyone is when we take her to the White Coats. Other than that, we wouldn't have even known that she knew how to do that.
I could go on and on and on here about her antics, but I think I'll post this, and then try to figure out how to get more pictures of her posted.:D
