FABULOUS FELINE FRIDAY: RUSTY - MY FIRST FERAL

I didn’t come by my knowledge of how to turn a feral kittie into a domesticated cat out of thin air. It was knowledge hard gained from mistakes.

The first feral I brought inside was my main teacher, because I did everything possible wrong with her.

I discovered Rusty living under that truck with Smokey in 1999. She looked like she was maybe 2-3 months old, and I thought at first she might be Smokey’s offspring. After I kidnaped Smokey inside, she continued to hang around. I fed her, thinking that might “domesticate” her, and finally after a month I grabbed her. She was so flabbergasted, she didn’t fight till we got to my apartment, where I made the mistake of just putting her down in the living room.

Terrorized by the event, she ran around everywhere, hissing and spitting at everything and everyone, and then hid in the closet where I couldn’t find her. Three days later, she was ready to come out because she was hungry. She was still discombobulated enough that I could grab her and pet her for a moment. I knew she needed to be fixed and knew so little about a feral that I stuck her in a cat carrier and took her to the vet.

She was still terrified enough to go limp and let the vet handle her. At which point I found out she was pretty rare. She was a “she.” Perhaps a little-known fact: over 99 of every 100 orange tabbies are males. A female orange tabby is really rare, less than 1 in 100. And there she was: an orange tabby and a female.

She came home fixed and then proceeded to “re-feralize.” She kept her distance. It took a year before she started hanging out where I could see her, and another year before she would hang our close enough I could take pictures of her. I just kept talking to her whenever she showed up, and feeding her, and being nice to her. She got closer, but if I made any “false moves” in her determination, it was back to hissing and spitting and fangs bared and claws out.

Catching her to get her into a carrier when we moved to the first house here in the west San Fernando Valley took putting on my leather flying jacket and leather work gloves, and then it took moving everything out first so she had no place to hide to finally exhaust her and catch her.

Standoffishness and a refusal to submit to humans continued at the new house, though she became friends with the other cats.

And then, one Sunday in 2010 when I was sitting in the barcalounger reading the Sunday LA Times, someone jumped on my knees on the other side of the paper, and then the someone poked her head under the paper and looked up at me.

Rusty.

Very carefully, I put the paper aside, and let her sit there on my knees. Finally, she took a step toward me. I reached out and touched the top of her head between her ears. She accepted my touch. There’s really no moment more amazing than when a wild animal decides to trust you, a human, and decides you are worthy of friendship.

Over the next four years before she scampered across the Rainbow Bridge, Rusty and I became good friends, though she became better friends with Jurate. She loved to get up on Jurate’s lap when she was knitting and bat the yarn.

When her time came, she fell asleep in my arms that night, and when I woke in the morning, she was gone.

She was a good teacher.

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