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From commentor Delia:
This is a picture of my cat Katrina. My daughter {Delia Jr) adopted her when she was a student at Sonoma State in California. She and her roommates were looking for a cat to catch mice (!) and one morning (the day Katrina hit NO, as it happens) a roommate went to the county animal pound before it opened and found this cat who had been dumped. She had a collar and tag that read “Scarcat” because her left ear has the tip sliced off. My vet says it’s the mark some programs for spaying/neutering strays and ferals use to mark the ones who have been done.
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The sad fact is many college students will adopt a cat or kitten for a while and then abandon it when they finish school. This cat had no interest in catching mice, and Delia Jr was the only person in the household who was kind to her. She named her Katrina; the cat adopted her, and she kept her as she moved around for a couple of years. I paid for her shots whenever they came to visit. But cats start getting a little bit psycho when they move too much, and Katrina was no exception. Delia Jr was kind of hesitant to leave her with me, because my dog Pippin and cat Saffy are closely bonded, but when she (the human) left for grad school in Toronto she had no choice. I figured it was karma for the cat I left with my mother when I went off to grad school.
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Katrina’s been with me three years now. She’s figured out that the dog is pretty harmless and she and the other cat get along fine now. Both cats sleep on my bed. She’s learned that snuggling on a human lap is very nice, but she still likes to stay outside, at least until the weather turns nasty. And she’s very good at keeping other stray cats out of the yard.
stuckinred
This is such a problem here in Athens as well. At the end of every school year dogs and cats get dumped all over town and out on the country roads.
Andy K
Adopt a Todd Rundgren song today. Here’s mine:
We Gotta Get You A Woman
JPL
Katrina has made herself at home. I did not realize that cats have trouble adapting to new spaces. As long as the master is there, dogs just go with the flow. For dogs home is where the heart is.
Stuckinred, I grew up in the northeast and summer visitors would leave pets also. That’s a situation, I can’t fathom.
Nikki
Are her eyes really that green or is it caused by the lighting?
Ash Can
That looks like a very huggable kitty. :)
WereBear
@JPL: Cats are territorial. They need to know every nook and cranny; and know that it is theirs.
A more socialized cat would adapt better; ferals tend to have more instinctual drive.
phillygirl
Blessed are those who take in graduate students’ cats. I kinda choked up at the “Scarcat” part. Thanks for giving her an undoubtedly fabulous bed.
rickstersherpa
I will have to send in pictures of the five we own in our fairly dysfunctional feline family.
Since this is an open thread, I am going to link to the Times article about the disappearing Democratic Party in the South. I have the following thoughts. nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/politics/19south.html?_r=1&hp
1. Up to 1992, moderate Democrats competed quite well in the South, with a coalition of Blacks,d moderate whites and the few liberals who exist. It elected mostly pro-business types, but they were definitely “New South” and did not wrap themselves in the Stars and Bars.
2. Starting with Atwater, but really refined by Karl Rove in 1994, Republicans added hippie punching and gay baiting to go along with White resentment and antagonism to Blacks to shear off a large fraction of the white vote and to make the Democratic brand alien. Also, the use of the gerrymander ot create large minority majority districts in the South further segregated the vote.
3. The Democratic party’s walk away from their manufacturing and union base with NAFTA and WTO eliminated one strong reason working class whites had to vote Democratic. The rural and small town South has been devastated by the decline of manufacturing, especially in furniture and auto parts. A declining standard of living while seeing the coasts prosper added to resentiment and distrust of elites, who the Republicans successly painted as “liberal” and “Democrat.”
4. Finally, Black Democrats in the South have been uninterested in party building, satisfied that they have their own “safe” districts. I like Jim Clybourn a lot, but a the fact that he was surprised by “Al Green’s” nomination in the South Carolina primary shows just how little he cared about the results until he was embarrassed by them. Now we will get DeMint reelected with 70% of the vote and the National Review and the Weekly Standard will be using that as evidence of his great popularity and the popularity of his reactionary policies.
5. I don’t buy all the criticism of the President and his advisors, but he and they do show a certain Chicago/urban provinicalism and tendency to dismiss rural dwellers (I am from Chicago and know how we believe that “downstate” are all barefoot, ignorant, peasants compare to us shrewed city slickers. It was just part of the warp and woof of the culture I grew up in.) Obama, Rahm, and Axelrod just seemed pretty hostile to Howard Dean’s 50 state party building program. Some of the fruits of that hostility are now coming in.
Jenn
A story with a happy ending (which I needed – thank you!), & wow, those eyes. Green-eye is much cooler than red-eye!
asiangrrlMN
Katrina is beautiful. Thanks for taking her in and giving her a stable home.