Ok, long story short: yesterday I came into possession of a cat named “Bruce.” I did not seek out Bruce; I just wanted to mail a box at the post office and wound up with a cat. Bruce had been in an apartment, but when the landlords told the people “no cats,” their response was to just kick the cat out onto the streets.
Hrrrmph.
Anyway, I found a new home for him with one of my neighbors (four cats is several too many, realistically)… until her husband came home and nixed the idea. And so Bruce was delivered back to my house.
And then I found another home; slight difficulty in that that home is 1200 miles from here, but that’s not insurmountable. Apparently United and Delta will both transport critters.
So today I took Bruce to the vet for the standard checkup. And as it turns out… Bruce has feline leukemia. Spectacular. This nixes the distant home, since there is another cat there, and I don’t want to deliver a “special needs” cat there.
So now I have cat number five. He will be permanently quarantined in the basement, what with the transmissible fatal virus and all. This is not terribly fair to him, but it’s the best I can do. I’m going to try to find him another home, but I’m foreseeing some difficulty there. It seems to me that any household that loves cats enough to take in a cat that a few years from now will start requiring extra medical care will probably already have cats. So, uhhh… anybody want a cat?
Bruce is an astonishingly friendly cat – with humans. With other cats he is extraordinarily antisocial; under the circumstances, that’s just fine. So unless I can find him a good home, he’s going have his own apartment in my basement. It used to be one of my computer rooms; it will be again so that he won’t feel like an abandoned cat… again. This can only last a little while. Eventually the leukemia will kick in, and I’ll be forced to do something I really don’t want to do (again).
The AMC series “The Walking Dead” has repeatedly made a point of showing awful consequences of characters showing any sort of soft heartedness. While I have so far managed to avoid being consumed by zombies, here, once again, an attempt to do A Nice Thing for an abused animal leads to a gut-punch.