The Feline Purrsuasion

Posting photos of your cat is supposed to be the blogging equivalent of jumping the shark... but I'm doing it anyway since we actually adopted ZB last spring and although I've written a little about her I just noticed that I hadn't ever posted any pictures of her.

It's been so lovely to have a cat again!! She gets along great with all the dogs - and I'm very, very proud of our dogs for how well they've adapted to her. She does get a lot of the credit, because she's just fearless. If a cat doesn't hiss and run when a dog approaches, the dog is much less likely to try to chase the cat!

This is the first photo I took of her after we started letting her into the house.

Here she is sleeping on the bed with Kinsey

Here's a closeup - I told you she was comfortable with the dogs!!


Flat cat

This is a pretty typical scene at feeding time. Except she's not always this patient, and will sometimes start knocking things off the counter if the food doesn't start appearing quickly enough.

She's even taken well to eating a raw diet! Although I've been feeding a raw diet to our dogs for about 10 years, I didn't switch my cats over back then. They were old, and healthy and it was partly a case of "if it's not broke, don't fix it" and partly that they were totally not interested in raw food. From what I've been told and have read, this is very common - switching dogs to raw food is usually pretty easy but switching cats can be very difficult.

But not ZB - she will eat pretty much anything. I started out feeding her pretty much the same thing I was feeding the dogs, but just adding more heart since that is a good source of the taurine that is so important for cats. And about one meal a day - or every other day - she got some grain-free canned cat food just to cover the bases. But now I've found a good recipe for homemade cat food, and she's getting that and is doing fabulously well.

The only thing that really has been a challenge has been making her into an "inside only" cat. She enjoys being outside - and admittedly she survived out there for at least 3 or 4 months while we were teaching the dogs that she was not to be chased - but it's just not worth the risk unless we're watching her. I'd like to build her an enclosure - well, to be honest, I'd like Ronnie to build her an enclosure - but that hasn't happened yet. So we occasionally let her outside while we supervise, and occasionally she escapes but we get her back inside pretty quickly.

I love having a cat again!