The one about the cat

I have owned "normal" pets before, as has Drew. But something about our joint raising of fur kids seems to produce animals of less-than-ideal temperament.

Abbie, for example, in addition to all her other issues, has recently started barking at her reflection, even though she's slept in front of the mirror her whole life. 

Even our fish were suicidal.

But our most challenging animal was definitely our cat. 

Wily went through a particularly difficult stage when we moved house.

We were told not to let him outside until he had adapted to his new home, but he didn't adapt. He started, um, spraying. On everything.

We took him to the vet, who diagnosed him with anxiety. 

We were instructed to give him what was pretty much "Cat Valium" - a task that is much easier said than done.

But once we finally did it, he turned into a zombie.

The spraying stopped, but we felt awful. The floppy lump of fur that never moved from the bed just wasn't our cat.

One day I saw another cat in our yard. I wondered if maybe Wily had seen it before, and if his territorial instincts had actually been the cause of his "behaviour issues".

The vet said it was possible, so we took him off the drugs and let him go outside...
And he returned to his normal self pretty quickly.

He wasted no time trying to teach the other cat, Baxter, who was boss.

During one particularly nasty fight, Baxter scratched a large chunk out of Wily's head, and back to the vet we went.

Things carried on like this for a while, then one morning Wily left the house as usual, but didn't come back that night.
Well-meaning friends suggested that maybe he had found a new family he liked more than us and had decided to move. While possible, I doubted this was likely.

We never found out what happened to Wily, but of course I have my suspicions.

RIP Wily. We will never forget you.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.