Adopt A Shelter Cat Month
Spring has sprung, and the birds and bees (and other critters) celebrate this time of year in typical creative fashion. It’s a national epidemic and North Texas isn’t immune. Area shelters overflow especially with kittens this time of year. My Karma-Kitten is a product of this “littering” problem, and I’m sure you’ve seen other needy waifs around town. June is the purr-fect time to celebrate national Adopt-A-Shelter-Cat Month.
YOU SEXY KITTEN!
Boy or girl? Fluffy longhaired or short-and-svelte coat? Does color matter? What about age? Today there are cats available to suit every taste and circumstance.
While kittens can be non-stop fun, they’re also works-in-progress–and you cannot accurately predict adult temperament. Most kittens love to lap-sit, but many outgrow this behavior. So if you want a lifelong feline lap-snuggler, choose an adult cat with an established personality so you know what you’re getting. You’ll already know that the cat likes or dislikes dogs, other cats, children, lap-sitting, and playing.
Short fur sheds just as much as the long fluffy kind, but won’t tangle or require as much care on your part. Those longhaired beauties like Persians need combing every single day.
All kinds of speculation abound regarding behaviors associated with coat color or pattern. None of it has been proven one way or another. However, it is a cat “rule” that dark fur lands on light-colored clothing while light fur magnetically attaches to dark trousers. When a cat has both light and dark fur, like my Seren, owners learn to live with hair and consider it a condiment.
Boy cats tend to grow bigger than girl cats, but as long as they’re spayed or neutered (you’ll want to do this!), the behaviors tend to be similar. Intact males want to baptize everything with sprays of urine, and intact girl cats bring more furry babies into this world after yowling and pestering owners to death.
MATURE CAT VS KITTEN DELINQUENT
Age matters. While space concerns force shelters to adopt out kittens as early as possible, a cat will have far fewer behavior problems if he stays with mom-cat and siblings until at least twelve weeks old. If you adopt a kitten younger than this, you should either have a friendly adult cat in the house prepared to teach Junior how to be a proper cat–or you yourself must attempt to give these lessons. Cats learn from watching other cats how to groom themselves, use the litter box, scratch the right object, and inhibit clawing and biting during play. Humans fall short as teachers.
Lovely adult cats often get overlooked, but they’ve already learned these basic lessons and make outstanding pets. Due to the overload of animals, too many shelters have arbitrary age limits for euthanasia. Cats aged five and above may be euthanized automatically, even though they could be expected to provide a decade or more of companionship to a loving human owner.
Older cats tend to be more sedate than kittens, and less inclined to climb curtains, attack toes, or conduct gravity experiments by knocking breakables off high spots. My Seren-kitty rarely plays “gravity experiments” any more, thank goodness!
At the shelter, don’t expect adult cats to “sell themselves” the way a kitten would. Remember that they’ve likely just lost their home, are scared and sad, and wondering what they did to make a beloved human go away. They need people to take a second look.
Last Christmas, I received emails and phone calls from folks looking for holiday kittens–at a time of year when furry babies are scarce. Now’s the time to look since a bumper crop abounds and you’ll be saving a life by adopting a cat.
You don’t need to wait for Adopt-A-Shelter-Cat Month. Wonderful candidates of all shapes, ages, and sizes wait for you at area shelters all year long. Seventeen years ago, my cat Seren(dipity) showed up on a friend’s back porch, and purred her way into my heart. And only a few weeks ago, Karma-Kitten made his grand entrance into my world. May you be so lucky as to find the cat of your dreams!
New to kittens? Never fear! You can find all the must-know info on caring for a new furry wonder in my book COMPLETE KITTEN CARE!
I think that September Day (my animal behaviorist main character) and her dog Shadow may need to adopt another “furry waif” in the next book SHOW AND TELL. What do you think? The next stop on my HIDE AND SEEK Bog Tour features a Guest Post at the Writers & Authors Blog, covering the how-to’s of writing animal point-of-view characters, enjoy!
I love hearing from you, so please share comments and questions. Do you have an ASK AMY question you’d like answered–post in the comments. Do you have a new kitten and need answers? Stay up to date on all the latest just subscribe the blog, “like” me on Facebook, check out weekly FREE PUPPY CARE newsletter, and sign up for Pet Peeves newsletter. Stay up to date with the latest book give aways and appearances related to my THRILLERS WITH BITE!
AMY SHOJAI'S Bling, Bitches & Blood - Pet-centric Writer-icity & Thrillers With BITE!
