Two of Five...

[Joyce]

Two of my cats...
Willow, my majestic male Maine Coone, weighing in at 20 pounds, summer weight. (my only male cat)




And Selkie, who lost her tail to an idiot who was superstitious towards black cats.
Cost me $830 in medical Bills after she was attacked.
She is my mushiest female baby, but always looking for more trouble.
For instance...

 

[ponderer]

Very handsome and pretty kitties.

[EagleEye]

Willow is indeed a very handsome boy , and he reminds me of Charlie.
But Charlie doesn't weigh that much.

Steve

[karen J]

Your cats are beautiful!

Maine Coone cats are just the coolest cats ever. I've only met one once, but I was in love. 

I lost my 20 YO cat last August, it was time. I decided to go pet- less for awhile, now we're thinking...

[Kittyzee]

Willow is quite handsome, he looks like he has his sleek summer coat.  Does he fur up in the fall with a mane and side face tufts?  My Maine Coon cat has a tail that I am envious of--if I could have one, it would look like his!       

And Selkie looks like a vixen:  and quite the trouble maker! 

[miguynmkoi]

Beautiful cats!  Obviously well taken care of by you.  Wish cats in my neighborhood had better care.  They don't look anything as clean or heathy as yours.

[Joyce]

His mane and tufts shed for the summer.
In that top photo, you can see a few long strands that are still hanging on, haven't shed yet.

Here is a photo in the winter, in his favorite chair.
It you look closely, you can see the dark black tufts of hair he grows between his toes that cover the pads in the winter.
What I refer to as his 'snow shoes'. Makes his paws look 2x as big as normal in the winter.


And a good pic of his tail, a couple winters ago when I put some catnip at the bottom of this crock...

It's easily 6-7" wide in the winter. 

[Kittyzee]

OMG, he looks almost identical to my Simba!  I'll have to get a more recent photo of him, these are a few months old.  But he has those paw feathers that are very sensitive--make his feet ticklish when I trim his claws    and makes him whiney.  And try and get a shot of his fluffy tail, I see Willow's is almost like a feather duster too!   

Oops, only meant for 2 pics, not 2 of the same....

[Joyce]

Simba is a handsome 'King' isn't he?
They are just so 'Majestic' to me. 
They can't help but behave like royalty.   


Willow sure knows what the camera is all about!
 

[Bartman]

Are you saying that someone cut off her tail?  Like a black cat crosses your path you need to cut off its tail to take away the bad luck?  I didn't think anyone was that crazy to actually do that.  There is black cat in this area that runs across the alley all the time in front of me.  I am not keeping up to the superstition rituals apparently.

Bart

[Jonna]

What beautiful cats!  I love the Maine Coons, I had a cross of one for 18 years and he was the light of my life.  They wouldn't do well down here though, it's too hot for them.  We rescued a 2 week old kitten about 2 months ago and she is a tabby with similar markings but not the heavy thick coat or the size.  I think I posted some pics of her when she was so tiny we didn't know if she would make it.  She's healthy now and much bigger, here are a couple recent pics.

Hanging out in the hammock


With 2 of the dogs.


She found a milk box to use as a fort in the pantry.


Here's a pic of her right after we got her attacking one of the dog toys.


I can't even deal with the kind of sickness that would do what was done to your cat.  People like that should just be culled, put down humanely and kept out of the gene pool.

[Kittyzee]

I agree with you Jonna about the culling process:  extreme maybe but effective.  I have a neighbor who offered to take my 5 kittens for their barn.  They have 2 dogs who roam our countryside where nothing is safe--groundhogs, squirrels, rabbits, quail--they kill everything.  I politely declined 

Selkie is beautiful without her tail, but they use them to express their moods and I think (as in the case with a Maine Coon) they can sometimes be a status symbol   

BTW your kitten is darling! 

[Joyce]

Bart, there are plenty of mean and insane whackos like that in this world. 
My vet had to shave her whole tail and rump area, and when he did, he saw the slices.
And she had been grabbed by the scruff of the neck while the idiot was trying to chop her tail off with some kind of blade weapon.
Her neck and shoulder area was shaved looking for bite wounds, because at first we thought she had been attacked by an animal or hit by a car,
and she would scream every time anyone manipulated her shoulder and neck.
After shaving, all the vet found was a damn good impression of a human hand in black and blue impressions.
You could actually see the finger/fingernail impressions on the skin of her neck.
I hope she sliced and diced her attacker with her claws, and that is why she survived the attack.
She also had a couple good blade slices on her rump, across the back of her legs, like defense wounds, she was trying to ball up while being sliced.
Many of the South American migrant workers here have awful superstitions towards black animals.
all in all, she had about 200 stitches just on the leg and rump slices, not including the surgery she had to go through to remove her tail,
which had been injured so badly it there was no hope, it had started to go into gangrene/maggots.
(it took her days to show up at the house after the attack, very weak and near death)

Back at the time clock here at work, I posted the story (in Spanish) about Selkie and how much it had cost to treat her.
I explained it was my daughters cat, and that (at that point) we were not sure she would survive.
I asked that if anyone ever sees a black cat again, to please leave it alone.
And to turn in anyone who abuses ANY animal, black or not.
I got some feedback a few days later and 'get well ' kitty wishes, and found out 'probably' who it was...and was told that he was 'told off' by his fellow workers.
He happened to be living in one of the labor worker apartments behind my old house...where Selkie used to hunt mice in the barns.
He also liked to shoot the black crows that landed on the top of the barns, and that stopped too.
Thank goodness he worked for the sod division of my company, because if he was a landscape employee, I would have never used him on any of my jobs again.
I still gim him death looks every time I see him.

Anyway, GORGEOUS kitty Jonna and thank you so much for giving her a home!
She looks so happy and content...and has awesome canine body guards!

Kittyzee, Selkie even without her tail, is the most sleek and athletically graceful cat I have ever had.

[joeyb5980]

What a horrible, horrible story about your cat... I'm glad it had you and Jamie to take care of it, and it looks very happy and well now

[Joyce]

Thanks Joey.

My vet was extremely upset, wanted to find the guy and prosecute.
Selkie had a twin sister named Banshee who was found dead on the property a few months before Selkie was attacked,
and when that happened, we assumed she had been attacked by an animal or hit by a car.
Now we aren't so sure. 

My vet took photos of Selkie for evidence. Everyone at the animal hospital was so gentle and loving with Selkie. 
They made her as comfortable as possible and I don't think there were many moments where she was not being sweet talked and/or petted.
She came home 8 days later as lovable and trusting as before, if not more. She acted a little spooked now and then, and I swear it was whenever she heard Spanish being spoken by the workers at Briarcliff Sod which was next door to our old house. The Guatemalan workers would often shout above the noise of the sod trucks and tractors when talking to each other, and we would be able to hear them through the hedges no problem, especially when the windows were open.

She is such a good kitty, despite everything. 

Too bad there are such assinine prejudiced-toward-color-religious-superstition people in this world.

[Kittyzee]

Very interesting and enlightening story about Selkie, Joyce.  Yes, she is certainly lucky that you and Jamie are her family!  I can't imagine someone being that determined to harm any animal that way.  I hope she laid the guy open and his cuts got infected.  (Cat scratches can hurt!) It's surprising that she didn't have lots of mental stress after that and just go into hiding from people all together.  

I have a cat "Pudgie" that got about 2 inches of her tail cut off when she ran out of a doorway as the door was being shut.  It literally "skinned" her tail off with the fur left behind and the cartilege sticking out      The vet removed the part sticking out and stitched the end and had to shave her entire tail.  She was very confused:  her tail hurt and when she would thump it on the ground it would cause her pain, she would look at it and not recognize it, growl at it and bite it and then that would hurt- starting the whole process all over again.  It took several days for her to calm down.  Her tail looks good now, just quite a bit shorter than the average cat tail.

[Bartman]

That certainly is a sad story, but at least it had a good ending.  People are really nuts.  No wonder I spend most of my time trying to avoid them!

Bart

[Esther]

People are so stupid! I would like to do to them what they do to hurt animals. Don't get me started. Joyce your kitties are so neat. We had a black cat for a long time and loved it to death. I have never heard of that thing of cutting the tail off. So stupid. Loved the picture of Kitty in the crock. LOL Selkie looks like a panther in the tree.

On a different tack, there are the fools who don't protect their children. North of Grand Rapids just this week, it was on the news where a parent left a 17 month old baby in a car seat of a pickup sitting in the sun, windows closed. Yup, it died. they showed the truck in the driveway of the home---------THAT HOUSE WAS A HUGE EXPENSIVE one on a huge grassy well landscaped lawn. Sometimes when you hear of that type of thing, the parent left the kid in the car while they went in the store. That is stupid too. Shouldn't be allowed to have kids.

And JOnna, you have your hands full too I see. They are so cute you just have to put up with their energy and naughtiness.

[Bartman]

Here the cat would be lucky to just lose the tail.  If you follow superstition here you must catch the cat and kill it.   As far as I know no one has actually done that here and if they had it didn't make the local news.  Small place so things like that would get attention.  Thank goodness.  My friend had a black cat for 14 years and it crossed my path many times.  Can't say I felt my luck was any worse than anyone else's.

Bart

[karen J]

Joyce, I can't help but notice there was a maggot problem? We had a cat, many years ago, that succumbed to that. What an awful thing. Our cat died from it, and it was a cat we adopted from North Shore Animal League in Port Washington. They had given the cat a clean bill of health, yet this happened within a month of us adopting the cat.  :'( That was painful.

Anyone who would do such a malicious thing to your cat should burn in H E double L, forever and in eternity. Oh but wait, God LOVES you! Can't happen. 
Oh well. 

I got to pet a Maine Coone cat once, it was precious.  Maybe some day... 

[Jonna]

We had a black cat for 14 years up in Marin county, north of the Golden Gate bridge in California.  A very high end county that always scored very high on state education tests.  We had to lock our cat up every year around Halloween because the kids - really the out of control, spoiled, idiot teenagers, would try to light her on fire or something worse.  Most superstition comes from ignorance and lack of education, but in this case it was just over indulged, spoiled kids with no boundaries.  I lived there for around 20 years and I was very glad to leave.  I've had it with the current child rearing ways. 

Down here, the poor and the indigenous are very superstitious, and very religious.  They have all kinds of beliefs that defy logic and science but that they truly believe and defend.  Did you know that night air carries the risk of disease and possession by evil spirits?  So, no matter how hot it is keep those windows closed.  That the pain of childbirth can be reduced by putting a sharp knife under the bed of the mother before birth?  Cuts the pain you know.  There was a murder in the paper the other day that I couldn't believe.  It seems that some men (cousins) from a small town in Chiapas came to Cancun for work, they ran into a guy from their village that their mothers had told them put a spell on one of their fathers and he died.  This was 20 years ago.  What did they do when they realized who they were drinking with?  Well, they chopped him up with their machetes of course.  Their defense was that they were in fear of their lives that he would put that spell on them too.  No, it didn't work as a defense.  Even my maid who is fairly well educated and can read and write and knows her rights and the laws, she is trying to convince me to have a woman come over and 'cleanse' my condo because she says the old property manager was a bad witch and he left his spells behind.  I may let her do it as I'm tired of hearing about it and I don't want her to quit because of it. 

[purplepshn2004]

Joyce,

I love your kitty's and their names.  I've never seen a main coon in person, but my boss had a friend that had one, was huge.  I looked them up.  Would be cool to have.  I was never a cat person (dogs were my love), but decided to adopt a cat around christmas last year.  Her name is Judson and she is such a good kitty (little over 2 years old).

Jonna,

My Judson looks a lot like your little kitty, how adorable!

Here are a couple pic's of mine, she has something for the dryer when I'm doing laundry...

[Kittyzee]

Reading Joyce's and Jonna's posts jolts me to the fact that even though it may be the year 2008, many people still have medieval belief systems.  We really haven't come very far in educating people have we?  It's discouraging in the gap there is amongst all of us walking around on two legs on this planet.  Fear is a powerful emotion that prompts powerful reactions, IMO educating people helps to alleviate some of those fears.   

[Joyce]

purplepshn2004, that is one gorgeous kitty! So glad she has a good home now! 
Has she changed your opinion about cats?

Karen, yes, there was a maggot problem, didn't want to get that much into detail, but you could see them under the skin, the bottom half of her tail was full of them, eating dead flesh. The skin was rippling with the movement of the maggots.
That is why the tail had to come off. Then she had to take over a month of meds to kill the blood infection. She was lucky, the hair all grew back and covered all the scars, without any ripples, visible scar tissue or disfigurement except for the tail gone.

What Jonna says is true here too.
We have a lot of Guatemalans and other South American Migrant workers around here, both for the company I work for and all the vineyards around here.
They all have whacky superstitions. Most are 'Catholics', but that Catholicism was enforced by terrorism by consequences of death, over their native South American religions, so it became a conglomeration of all belief systems. Which has now resulted in these perverse beliefs.
And yes, they all carry these huge machetes, all the time. The machetes are always razor sharp and shiny like chrome...like they've been used a lot and polished with reverence.

Bart... Hello?  They weren't just trying to chop her tail off!    They were trying to hack her to pieces, hence all the slices and deep gashes all over her like I've described already in a previous postal. She must have scratched him good enough to let go of her, otherwise she'd be dead, in pieces and probably burned in a bon fire. Then she crawled some place to either try to heal or die. She came home days later full of maggots and half dead with loss of blood and a blood infection.
This is a tiny town too, like 'Mayberry' from the Andy Griffith Show. Couple a thousand people year round, not including the assinine tourists in the summer. Very 'New England', colonial and quaint.  Not like stereotypical 'NY' (what ignorant outsiders percieve as typical NY) at all, and no, NY is not one big city. We have small towns, in fact more small towns, villages than big cities. It was not big news around here, cuz people know this crap happens, and not just black cats, black dogs are subject to the same treatment. ANY black animal. We don't like to put news like this on the front page of our local paper and we are such a small town, we don't have a our own news station on TV. Besides, we have more class than that than to air our dirty laundry just for ratings.  A lady about a mile from me had her black lab mix chopped up badly and his back was broken...he now has to use one of those trolleys for his back legs. She had a fund raiser in order to pay for his vet bills.
My vet is a serious cat person, and he was white with rage as he shaved my Selkie to treat her wounds. He told me straight out he has seen this several times with black cats around here. Selkie was the first cat he has saved from such an attack. But the first day he told me, not one cat he treated from such an attack survived, and he did not think Selkie could come out of this. But he knew Selkie was Jamie's, and that her twin had already been found dead. He stayed overnight with her. After 2 days, he told us she was going to make it. After 2 days, he looked like he had been up for a week. He really put everything he had into saving our cat. 

[Joyce]

LuAnn, you are right...but it's not just Medieval. It's right now. And besides, in the Medieval times, it was the Christians that tortured witches and burned them at the stake, beheaded them.
And tortured and killed black cats too. Yup, pretty much any one who wore too much black or didn't declare they were Christians. It's historical facts.  :'(

Yes, education is the answer...and JUST education.
Let's leave religion out of it, since that is what has caused all the trouble.

[Bartman]

And she had been grabbed by the scruff of the neck while the idiot was trying to chop her tail off with some kind of blade weapon.

Hence I took that as they were trying to remove her tail and between the cat fighting and the idiot trying to kill her the other cuts were related to that.  I'm not trying to belittle the event as I agree with everyone that is is aweful and anyone who does this is seriously nuts.  No excuse this day and age in North America for such acts.  It is a miracle she survived.

Bart

[Jonna]

Tonya, your kitty is gorgeous!  and looks very content and well fed too    Isn't it funny how much cats love heat?  It doesn't seem to matter if the temps are high they love to lay where it is really warm.  When Tita was smaller she would curl up on the brick for our sat modem, it heats up and she fit right on it. 



Rational, non-religious education really does help but it sometimes takes generations for the strength of these beliefs to weaken.  As I said about my maid, even those who are more educated hang on to the old beliefs.  I've met Doctors and Lawyers who may profess that they are not at all superstitious but who still cross themselves when a black cat walks in front of them or knock on wood to ward off something they said happening.  How many of us didn't step on the cracks in the sidewalks when we were kids?  Humans as a species seem to have a strong need for magical thinking to control their world, I think that need to control things has helped us as well.  It keeps the scientists searching for cures and for the reasons why things work as they do.  It's when we give up and assign everything to some magical formula or deity that it stops being a positive and can become very dangerous.

All that aside, I find cultural belief systems fascinating and I love to learn about them and to visit the shrines and sites.  I figure as long as a religion is not calling for war or killing those who disagree, then it is interesting and probably very comforting to its believers.   It's the 'my way or the highway' attitude that bothers me.

[Kittyzee]

Joyce, I didn't bring religion into it. Educating is what I said, and what I meant.  Some may have thought I meant by educating, that I meant Christianizing, since many times they go hand in hand.  And any woman could have been victimized then as now, by declaring her a witch if she got in the way of a monk/priests/bishops agenda and then she was publicly beaten until dead.  Historical fact, hard but true, but ALL religions have victimized women, not just Christianity and continue to do so daily.  

[Joyce]

I was agreeing with you LuAnn, not disagreeing.  
I think plain old unadulterated education is what is needed everywhere, including public schools.
That is why the 'Under God' part of the pledge I find revolting. (and on currency)
Any time religion is rammed down anyones throat, I find it revolting.
Separation of church and state is healthy for all involved.
And freedom of religious persecution is what this country was built on...FREEDOM from persecution in any way.

Like Jonna, it's the my way or 'die' way that I find revolting.

But I disagree...Some religions do NOT victimize, oppress and suppress women.
Such as my belief system...aka... the oldest religion in the world.
But then again, that is why they call her Mother Nature. (and not Father Nature)   

Joann, that is such a cute pic of your kitty!

[Kittyzee]