The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
Share a photo of your pet and tell us one thing that makes them uniquely them.

Every friendship is unique. It doesn’t matter if one or more of the friends is human. I’m going to tell you about my non-human extended family/friends.

I grew up with both dogs and cats, I’ve had many meaningful long-term friendships with both species (yes, they are family, but family-ship doesn’t work editorially, so friendship).

While I’ve usually had at least one furball in my life, repeatedly moving between continents has meant having to resist expanding my furry friend group, until recently.

Now it’s bigger than ever, and this has taught me so much about my furry friends.

Tasha is our eldest, at nineteen, and the only one who wasn’t found. We took her from a co-worker who couldn’t keep her. She’s been with us twelve years now. I’ve written about her incredible language comprehension skills here.

The others started arriving about five years ago. In 2020, my wife and I moved to her hometown. We live beside a golf course, a nice area on the edge of a truly upscale neighbourhood.

It turns out that anyone who wants to abandon kitties, abandons them on the edge of the golf course. In early 2021, we started rescuing cats. Which would be fine and good if only we did as good a job of giving them away as we do in finding them.

So now we have a core group of nine cats, with another nine cats living in the house, two at the vet, five outdoor cats that we’re taming, and another five living with a relative. That’s thirty cats.

And my wife wants a dog.

We’ve also re-homed about fifteen cats, and beyond the core nine, we’d re-home any of the other twenty-one if we find a suitable adopter.*

So, with so many cats to choose from, what makes each unique? The way their social interactions display their personalities – not only with humans but with each other.

There are outsiders, cliques, favouritism, and shifting allliances; There are stupid cats, smart cats, emotionally intelligent cats, affectionate cats, neurotic cats, manipulative cats…

Bluebell, named for her eyes, is good at stealth attacks then looking innocent when her victim complains or retaliates.

Daniel knows everyone’s name. If I can’t find a cat, I can ask him, “Daniel, where’s cat-name?” and he’ll look in the general direction.

Nikki has food insecurity that grows every time we add a ned cat (She was second to arrive, after Tasha, with Nikki’s litter-mate Ezra joining us a day later. Even at 4 weeks old, he was better at evading us, until he got too hungry.)

Grey-ba came to us pregnant and gave us three kittens, all of whom have lived their whole lives indoors and with us, and yet are insecure, while momma is the most relaxed cat we have. She’s lived on the street well into adulthood and knows how good she’s got it.

Firefox has an emotional intelligence that borders on outright empathy. Even though he’s not part of the core nine, I know my wife won’t be adopting him out. He’s the unofficial tenth.

The unofficial eleventh, Gigi, is an outdoor cat who has helped us rescue other cats. Somehow, lost kitten and wounded adults know to come to our place, and we think a lot of that is because of Gigi’s calm presence out front. She welcomes the inured and the little ones, and shows them that we can be trusted.

Ezekiel, Casper (with a ripped diaphragm), Zoe (with severely broken leg), and Firefox all came to us as adults, guided in by friendly Gigi.

Sylvia used to love living in the wild, but as soon as her batch of kittens was ready to be weened, she’d bring them to us, and we’d find them homes (We believe that Daniel may be one of hers, but from before we’d identified her). Eventually she and her mate, Bruce, came in and are part of the extended nine.

We live in a three level terrace home, the bottom being a granny flat where the extended group of seven live. The core nine live on the top floor, and both groups take turns accessing the mid-level – living room, dining room and kitchen.

Our core nine cats know that if they hear their name and “upstairs” it means to go to their assigned bedroom. It actually works better when we do this with a group and not individually. We can literally herd these cats like cattle.

As for the initial writing prompt, I can’t separate one from the group and say this one is unique and here’s why. They’re as individual as any of the multitude of students that I’ve taught. And yet each is also a cat in all the cat ways.

If you’re on instagram, our cats have an account, parks_pride. I haven’t been updating it recently, but you can meet a lot of our older crew there and see just how badly Casper was doing before we rescued him.

= = =
*Until recently, I thought shelters that reject adopters were silly. Now we do site visits, owner training, and our cats come with a no-hassle return policy: We’d rather take them back than have you keep one in a bad situation or abandon it.