Cats, Cats, Cats, Cats

This is our cat's site, or so I like to pretend. Smart as they are, I haven't been able to teach them to make a web page, even with NetObjects Fusion's WYSIWYG capabilities. So I suppose it's really my site, about our cats.

Someone who doesn't believe that cats have personalities is someone who has never owned a cat, or shouldn't have. It's impossible to tell what they think but it's clear that they do, and that they have entirely different perspectives on life, other cats, and the people who think they own them.

We have four cats now. Our fifth, Baby Girl, was lost to cancer only a month ago, at the age of 23. You'll hear more about Baby Girl on her own page, but she was something else. I feel old myself, yet this cat had been with me for nearly half my life. Before her, I had her mother and grandmother, and still have her two twin daughters, who I think of as kittens, although they are approaching the age of 17 now.

Cutie and Lydia are the twins. They are both black, although Cutie started showing a few white hairs recently. While their fur is the same color, their personalities are as different as night and day. Until I married a woman who made me change their names, Lydia was known as "Kitty Who Hates Me", while Cutie was "Kitty Who Loves Me", sort of a Native American naming scheme, I thought, although my parents were Swedish. When they were very young, I could tell them apart only from the fact that Lydia would always greet me with a hiss. That hasn't changed much, although I've come to realize that she doesn't really hate me, she just scares easily.

The other two are Bird and Obadiah, mother and daughter. Yeah, I know that Obadiah is a man's name but Obie seldom reads the Bible, so I figured she probably wouldn't figure that out. Although Bird was as doting a mother as a kitten could want, in adulthood, they don't like one another very much, and most of the real fights that occur here are between mother and daughter and, being the smallest cat in the house by far, her mom usually loses.

Bird doesn't have any feline friends in the house. We took her in as a stray seven years ago, and the others have never accepted her. Other than the fact that she was so cute, and we had given her a name, one of the reasons we kept Obadiah, rather than giving her away, was so that her mother would have at least one ally in the house, but it didn't work out that way.

That should be enough to give you an idea of what to expect from this site: pithy comments about our cats, and some photographs. If such things interest you for some reason, terrific. Otherwise, it's entirely possible that you might be bored silly.

Otherwise, if you wade through it, you might find something useful here. Over the years, I've managed to learn a few things about cats - not because I majored in anything of the sort in college, but because I've always had cats, and I pay attention.

I won't hesitate to give advice, or offer opinions, and you should feel free to take them with however many grains of salt you wish.

Throughout the site, you'll find recommendations to a variety of cat products. Some of these are affiliate links, which means that I receive a percentage from any sales, but my cut comes from the company's end, not yours. In other words, you don't any more by buying a product that you've been referred to from here than if you had gone to the company's site directly, and the percentage that I receive is not much, but it helps to pay the server costs.

On that subject, I'll promise you one thing, which is that I won't recommend anything that I wouldn't buy myself, and in most cases, these will be things that I do buy myself. If you're here, I assume that your cat means as much to you as mine do to me, and I my cut isn't worth selling you anything that wouldn't be good for your cat.

In other words, anything that I have to say about a product that we're offering for sale here will be true, to the best of my understanding and knowledge.

In summary, I've learned a few things about cats. One thing that I have learned is that the only way that you can train a cat to do tricks is if she thinks of it first. Like people, she will be able to think more clearly if she is healthy, happy, and well nourished. Our task, as cat owners, is to ensure these things, and to be among their friends.

-- Ken Anderson