Everywhere Cats

This is Beany cat, who is now officially seventeen years old! You can sort of tell that she’s on the skinny side, but only just a bit. She sure hasn’t started ACTING her age! She still goes a little crazy from time to time and tears around the house, and she still thinks it’s safe (and maybe funny?) to walk along the stair railing while I tell her to get down before she falls. And she’s still *definitely* the boss of the animals!

We have five cats, and I used to be able to say, “but two of them are outside most of the time,” except that they’re now all very much indoor cats. (The youngest one sneezed up a bot fly larva about a year ago, and that was Too Much for me, so now they have to stay indoors.) I won’t go on too much about each of them, but I will say that the fifth cat really balanced things out nicely. You don’t hear that very often! But we had three female cats (who, after a lot of turmoil between the younger two, had settled into more or less of a truce), and then our neighbor’s male cat decided he’d rather live here, thanks, and that really brought chaos into the cat community. He did settle down after we got him neutered, but it wasn’t until we got him a friend (a male kitten) that most of the wrinkles got ironed out.

This youngest cat (Bitsy) has always floated around as though the world were made for him, a little prince whom everybody loves. And it’s like the other cats went, “I guess we DO love him?” I’ve caught him snuggled up with all four of the cats at various times, and he’s seemed to make the others more accepting of one another, as well. It’s not 100%, but it’s pretty good, considering. I like to say that they went from being four random cats to a working cat colony once there were five of them.

But Beany is still the boss. She has been since I got her when she was a nine-month-old cat child. I had an older male cat already, and Beany came home and started running the place. But she’s always been good with kittens — I think it helps that she doesn’t doubt her position at the top! I really hope she’s still stealing my spot on the sofa many years from now.