This is Selah Kitty. I've had her for a bit over 4 years, picked up from a family friend's farm the summer after I went through multiple miscarriages, had quit my intense nursing job to focus on my health, and felt lost. At 12 weeks, she was the last kitten to go and always busy hunting and running about with her mother, so they had to catch her and stick her in a rabbit cage on their front porch to wait for me.
Her litter came about at the same time as a litter of St. Bernard mix puppies, and the family had 3 young rambunctious kids. To say she knew chaos was an understatement. I remember rounding the corner of the wrap-around porch and seeing her in that tiny cage with no food or water (where she had been for about 4 hours turns out), sitting bolt upright, self-assured and confident with her little tail wrapped around her toes, as a small stampede of puppies and children thundered by her on the porch. It was love at first sight. She was special!!!
How she came home in the car, on my lap since I failed to get a carrier. We made sure to rehydrate her very well at home after she sat in that cage for hours on that hot day!
Our house came with a cat door so we ended up using it. She was a mighty huntress who, unfortunately, liked to bring her often still-alive quarry inside. We're talking rabbits, snakes, bats, dried up fish from the river bed (those were not alive...). She was terrible for our local environment and I regretted making her an outside cat. However, my husband is not a cat person and did not want her inside full-time. To be fair, she might have destroyed our house without this outlet.
Her weirdest find: dead fish that died eating another fish?? Did she just bring it in to show me? WHY?
Our dog became begrudging friends with her:
Fast forward a couple years and we had a baby and decided to move into an RV while my husband did travel nursing jobs around the country. The cat and dog came with us, and I outfitted the cat with a harness and leash for walks (which she figured out with minimal hysterics) and a Tractive tracking collar for peace of mind. We moved every few months typically. I would walk her around outside in the harness to get her accustomed to our new surroundings, and then allow her to go outside with the tracking collar on. This was a calculated risk for the sake of her quality of life (and ours) in our small space. As time went on, she became very accustomed to this, and I went from walking her around in a new place for 2 weeks before letting her off leash, to a day or two. Watching her tracking collar patterns, she would always stick very close to home when in a new place, and very slowly widen her territory until she often walked, in a crazy zigzag that stayed reasonably nearby, up to four miles in a day! I was comfortable with how carefully she seemed to do this. Also, as a bonus, she was always so busy getting to know another place, meeting other cats, and sleeping in the camper in between that she rarely hunted.
Taking a wiggle break in our camper on a cross-country drive to another job:
After 2.5 years of this, we finally moved out of our camper 2 weeks ago and into an employee housing apartment after my husband accepted a full time position here in Idaho.
After an unfriendly run-in with another cat that left her beat up a couple months ago, I decided to transition her more to inside life in our new place. However, I knew she might still slip out and wanted her to be familiar with the area and have been letting her out once or twice a day to sniff around when traffic levels on the road nearby are low. She only stays out for about 5 minutes at a time anyway because she dislikes snow.
Today I put her collar on and let her out. She didn't reappear nearly immediately as usual so I peaked out the door. Raccoons! Raccoons everywhere!! I looked at my Tractive app and saw that Selah, apparently spooked by the raccoons, had bolted across the road and into the woods, and looped around behind neighboring houses. I called her from the front door and turned on the Live Tracking option on the app to see if she would turn my direction. Then, with no warning, the tracker DIED! I had no idea it was critically low; usually it sends me a million phone reminders. This was now my worst nightmare. We're in a new place, visibility to home is bad due to trees and giant piles of snow, and she's just ranged farther than ever in this new place in a hurry. I was left with a dead-end map and knew she could be moving fast.
The day was then filled with walking around calling her, crying while kicking myself for letting her outside at all while also envisioning her freezing to death in the coming weeks or getting hit on the road or eaten, and walking door to door with her picture and sticky notes with my info on them. Long story short... she found her way home 6 hours later. I don't feel that she was simply gallivanting about since she hates the snow and has been staying inside by choice more even before we moved. She appeared annoyed and tired. Exhausted actually. I think she had to work hard to figure things out. Once her initial annoyed full-body groom was done, she has stayed on my lap pretty much continually since she got home.
All that to say... that could have ended badly. It also helped me realize how much I adore and need my cat. It was hard to believe that after traveling the country with her constantly going outside, this would happen NOW. I think she's staying inside for real now.
Charge your tracking collars if you use them! Hug your pets! Don't understimate the scariness of a pack of darn raccoons! And happy holidays!!!
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