Hehe, well, "technically not a pet" is good enough for me; my cats have no idea they aren't technically pets. They're also ESAs.
Tiny is a twelve-pound ex-stray one-person-cat sort of a guy. He's very perceptive and aware of me, and has helped me get out of bed in the morning and broken me out of mental loops more times than I care to count. He's not as reliable as a service dog would be--of course not; he's a cat!--but I don't need a service dog, and Tiny is perfectly fine being my feline alarm clock and nudging me every once in a while when I'm acting odd. He also knows when things are unusual, and will remind me of them by going up to me, then walking away holding his tail up (which is a social gesture in cats) so I know he wants me to follow.
Tiny has alerted me of things like "Hey, you forgot to turn the oven off!" or, "You usually take your lunch with you; today you are trying to leave without it, and this confuses me." Tiny is also very anxious and easily overstimulated, and he gets sensory overload just like I do, and can get overwhelmed from interacting too much. Watching him helps me understand myself. We have an agreement: If I stop interacting with him when he bites me, then he won't bite down enough to hurt. So when he's had enough, he grabs my hand in his teeth and looks at me, and I stop interacting with him. It works.
Christy wasn't supposed to be my cat. She was about three or four years old when I first started fostering her for the local shelter. At the shelter she spent all her time hiding, because she was so stressed out by all the other cats, and had been sleeping in the litter box and had a cough because of the litter dust. So I took her home with me, intending to find her a permanent home as soon as I could. She spent her first weeks hiding and barely eating, but she came out of hiding, especially since I provided lots of perches and safe hiding spots for her to use as home-base for exploration. I did all the right things--took cute pictures, put her up on petfinder, all of that. But nobody wanted her, because she was already all grown up. After two years of fostering I finally told the shelter I might as well adopt her; Christy is an anxious cat as it is, and she'd have trouble readjusting to yet another new place anyway.
Unlike Tiny, Christy would never think of biting or scratching, and she can be very unassertive. Sometimes you have to watch her very carefully to know what she wants. I can even pick her up, and she'll let me do it even though she doesn't like it--she just sort of puts up with it (very handy for when I have to clip her claws, which is important because she and Tiny are indoor cats and long claws can get caught in the carpet.) Christy is prone to phobias--she used to be scared of soda cans until I taught her they weren't dangerous. She still folds her ears back when you pet her head, because I had to put ear drops in her ears when she first came to stay with me, and as a consequence she's scared of having her ears messed with. When she's in a good mood, Christy tends to wiggle on her back and ask for tummy rubs--the first cat I've ever met who actually enjoys them. Christy is cute, and she knows it. Sometimes she can be quite a clown. On the other hand, I definitely get the sense that she is an adult cat in her middle years--she's six years old now--and sometimes I think she must believe I am a silly young kitten whose antics she must put up with, but whom she likes because, after all, kittens are awfully cute.
22 Mar 2012, 10:00 pm
