Crazy Cat People: Life With Four Cats

Or: Why we let our cats run everything.

I love to talk about my cats. Considering I will be linking several other articles about my cats at the bottom of this one, I feel like that’s pretty evident.

My partner and I are definitely cat people. We don’t necessarily treat them like surrogate children, but they get spoiled just the same. We are also the type of people who have 500 pictures of our cats but maybe a dozen of each other — most of which primarily feature the cats.

Our particular group of cats, like most cats, are all weird little fuzzballs with definite personalities and interactions. Because I like talking about them, I’m going to do just that.

Jello and Bilbo are brothers from the same litter. They’re both black cats with small white patches in different places, which is how we differentiate them. Jello also has pointy ear tips, which makes him look a little demonic.

They are named after punk rockers — Bilbo’s name was originally Billy Jo, after the Green Day frontman, but we feel like Bilbo fits better based on his personality. They had a third brother, Darby, who passed suddenly five years ago. The trio was quite the bunch, stirring up trouble and generally causing a ruckus with Darby as the ringleader. Jello has since become the leader of the pack, getting into trouble and causing a ruckus, and Bilbo continues to be a somewhat confused but friendly thing who loves demanding pets.

Katsu is the next kitty to join the group and was around to meet Darby when she was a kitten. She’s a bit younger than the boys and is completely black. She’s also smaller and fluffier than they are, so there is no trouble telling them apart. She’s named after the Japanese food, which doubles as a pun meaning “to win” in Japanese.

Katsu has a bit of a snippy personality, and she has a definite preference for me as her human. She tends to let you know how she feels by biting, and while she generally doesn’t bite hard, she’s not afraid to do so. She also doesn’t like too much attention and can be aloof right up until she gets demanding, at which point she will get in your face.

Toner is the latest addition to our household, and she’s also a firecracker. Unlike the other three, who are all black, she’s a gray tabby, hence her name (the printer ran low on ink, as it were). She came to us a few years ago as a stray, appearing on our porch and demanding to come in. She’d been cared for at one point — she was already fixed when we took her in, and she didn’t have any fleas or parasites — so after nobody claimed her, we assumed she had been dumped.

Toner has a love/hate relationship with Katsu that causes her to attack Katsu whenever she can. It seems strange, because sometimes she wants to see what Katsu is doing and isn’t offensive, but other times she’ll charge across the whole house to go after Katsu. As a result, we try to keep the two separate. Katsu has a few places that are hers while Toner is out, and Toner goes into her own room for the night to prevent attacks so Katsu can have the run of the house.

All of our cats were rescued — the boys were found in a friend’s front yard as kittens and given to us as fosters until we could find homes for them. It turned out that their home was with us. Katsu was found as a kitten in the parking lot of a barbeque place begging for scraps, and we took her in with the intent of just keeping her. Toner came to us as an adult cat and is roughly Katsu’s age, although we couldn’t quite tell since she was already grown.

My partner and I love our cats, and they provide a lot of joy and comfort in our home. The dynamics can get hectic — since the girls don’t get along, keeping them separated can be stressful — but they are all cute and cuddly and adorable.

We were planning on being the home for wayward black cats before we got Toner, and honestly, I think we still will be. My partner has a soft spot for black cats, having lost a few of them as a kid to malicious people intentionally killing them. As it’s coming up on Halloween, we are especially careful to not let them out to prevent that sort of thing.

Right now, however, we love having our kitties around and are doing our best to care for the little buggers. As I write this, Katsu is splayed out on one of the vents absorbing the heat blowing up from the furnace, and it’s stinkin’ adorable.

Soon, it will be time for kitty breakfast, and the feeding frenzy will begin, so I believe I will end it here. This will likely not be my last article about my cats, however, so look forward to more cat stories. In the meantime, be well and pet your pets for me.

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Here are some other things I’ve written: