When I found out Kumari had been evicted from her apartment while she was in the hospital (and subsequently decided to kidnap her), I almost immediately started working on plans for what she'd want or need to bring with her.
Chief among these, of course, was her beloved kitty Dora. Fortunately for her, we live in a cat-friendly place, and will just need to pay another pet deposit when we renew the apartment to have her (perfectly legally) stay with us.
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| I'm not good at drawing cats. Particularly in MS paint. |
Since Kumari had just attempted suicide for the second time in as many months, had been having problems with her family relationships, her sexuality, and even some of her friends, I knew she would need as many reasons as possible to strengthen the Frantic Survival Instinct part of her (especially after talking to her at the hospital.) Having Dora with her to comfort her when she's down and give her something to take care of when she's up seemed like it'd be a big help in getting through the first few painful months.
So when we made the trek to Colorado to move her back with us, we brought along a tent-like cat carrier just for Dora.
Kumari's parents have an elderly cat that Dora really didn't get along with, so Dora had spent her last few weeks in the basement entertainment room of their house without getting much attention. When I was staying at their house I'd go down to pet her and play with her every night and was pleasantly surprised at how cuddly and affectionate she was in comparison to Trev's cat.
She even let us brush her, which according to Kumari she never does. Well, she let us brush her for the first 2 days. On the third day she was getting used to having access to humans again and would put up with none of my shit.
But we still had her cat carrier ready and brought it down to her room so she could get used to it, and right before leaving Colorado the day Kumari was released from Cedar Springs we packed Dora in the car with her food and litter box in the carrier with her.
Dora did not like this.
The entire time she was awake while she was in the carrier, every 30 seconds are so I'd hear "Meow?" in the saddest cat-voice possible coming from the backseat. She decided the safest place to not get squashed in the cat tent was her litter box. So she spent the entire 9-hour drive overnight sleeping in her own poo, waking up every 2 hours or so for 10 minutes to meow plaintively at us for stuffing her in a squashed carrier in the car when she could smell Kumari for the first time in weeks but still hadn't seen her.
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| Meow? Meow? Mew? Meow? Meow? Meow? Mooow? Mew? Meow? |
But we still got her to Oklahoma in one piece and only mostly traumatized.
However, moving has not been the biggest stress factor in Dora's life right now. You see, we live in a cat-friendly apartment because Trev wanted to finally be able to have his cat again when we moved in together 9 months ago. So we already had Aeris.
Aeris is a terribly adorable wide-eyed kitty cat, who's a complete and total dick sometimes. She's not particularly aggressive, she just has cat passive aggressiveness down to a science. Also, she's had some trauma inflicted on her by other cats before, so we planned to keep the cats separated as much as possible and introduce them gradually.
However, as soon as we brought Dora's cat tent in with (poor traumatized) Dora inside, guess who ended up riiiiight there.
And then they both freaked RIGHT out.
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| Mutual panic for days! |
Aeris was freaked out at seeing another cat in her territory. Dora was freaked out at seeing another cat when she was already freaked out. It took them two days before they could even glance at each other without having complete hissing meltdowns.
They did get over that in about 3 days though, and then reached a point where they could each coexist comfortably as long as Dora was safe in her cat tent in the living room and Aeris stayed in the bedroom. Any time Aeris tried to stray into the living room Dora would start making a bizarre meowing-growl that sounded like a siren.
I took to starting to call her Siren Cat. They have been doing better lately, since we moved Dora's tent away from the entrance to the bedroom (where she had a guard post set up for the first two days) and now they can get within about 4 feet of each other without freaking out.
They still wake us up occasionally because one broke the four-foot rule, Aeris still taunts Dora at times, and Dora is pretty tense all the time, but they've at least worked out a tentative peace for the time being. As long as they aren't looking at each other.
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