George, my Russian Blue tux, is a big baby. He loves attention, and he loves love, but he’s also very poor at being by himself. Within his first day here as a little one, I left to use the bathroom, shutting him in my room to protect him from our other three cats…and I could hear him crying pitifully from the other side of the wall, wondering where everyone had gone.
He’s going through that again, for a completely different reason.
Up until a few months ago, we had four cats: Jak (a red Maine Coon), Shiva (a silver tabby), Cally (a tricolor calico) and George. Shiva, as you may recall, was put to sleep after she developed metabolic problems, and Cally was removed from the house last month, after her antisocial behavior started to become a major problem. Cally went home with my mother, as was right—and now George has no friends to play with.
Jak is 8 years older than George and is not interested in playing with him at all. The only interactions I’ve seen between them since Jojo was a little one have been bad ones. Shiva wasn’t very nice to him either. Cally was his friend for a while, but eventually she got tired of his constant pestering, and his attempts to play with her sent her furiously screaming out of the room. George didn’t seem to mind; at least there were ‘people around’. But now the house is empty, save for Jak—and it’s taking its toll.
Every second he is conscious, George has been bothering me. I love my cat—he is the cutest, weirdest, sweetest creature I’ve ever known—but it is hard as hell to jobhunt, to write, to draw or to sleep with a 15lb cat climbing your leg and squeakily meowing at you. It wasn’t until Cally disappeared that George started talking, and now he won’t shut up. No amount of providing him with toys or petting him will make him feel better. He just keeps pestering me, because he has nobody else to bother, and nobody to play with.
My only answer to this hasn’t worked out very well. Turtle, our remaining one of the original four outdoor cats, lost her entire family over the course of the year. Her brothers were hit by cars and her mother was taken away by a shelter volunteer to try and adopt her out. Little Turtle is a bit over a year old—a year younger than George—and she has nobody to sleep next to at night, nobody to help her groom her head, and nobody to watch over her. George, by contrast, has nobody to play with and bother. When the antisocial Turtle (named for her habit of hiding from people) started showing interest in joining our family, I’d hoped she’d make George feel better.
It’s hard to say if it’s worked. When Turtle is inside, they don’t really play, though she’s tried to convince him a few times…but George stops bothering me, and goes back to ‘normal.’ No happier than he was when Cally was ignoring him, but no longer miserable enough to attach to my leg.
We’ll see what happens. Turtle comes with all her own baggage and a number of issues of her own, and she will never replace Cally. (For one, she’s not crazy.) But it’s one more companion for my poor Jojo—and I’d rather watch him be pestered by her than watch him be lonely.
