
	PetLore.com (The Home of Pets and their Tales)

Here are some stories about cats and their owners:

A Polecat

When I was about 11 or 12 years old, we had a family cat named Missy. She was a Siamese. She was the family baby. On several occasions she would get herself in predicaments taking her away from home for several days. She got herself locked in a neighbor's garage once for about 2 weeks. We thought she was stolen until she finally showed up on the porch wanting in.

It was mid summer and Missy again got herself into trouble. One afternoon it was her lunchtime and we (my mom and brother and I) were calling for her to come and eat. She would usually, without hesitation, come running once she heard the electric can opener running. Well she never showed up, so we thought she was outside. We checked the back door and yelled out her name. Nothing. We tried the front door and yelled out her name and we could hear her meowing back, which she always did when we hollered for her to eat. She would always meow back as to let us know she was coming.

Well we heard her meowing in the distance and thought she was coming. We didn’t know from where so we kept hollering for her. She kept meowing but we had no idea where she was. So we decided to wait for her arrival. Several minutes had passed and nothing. “Oh great, she got herself locked in a garage again” we thought, so we checked out our garage to make sure, but it was empty. We kept hollering for her but her meows kept getting more faint, so we thought she was stuck in a hole or something where she couldn’t get out, so we searched and searched and searched and nothing. She finally gave up meowing. We had no idea where she could be.

Couple days have passed and Missy never showed up. Now we started worrying again. She had to be locked in a garage somewhere. We could hear her once in a while but had no idea where she could be. My brother and I then decided to go on a full fledge cat hunt to find poor Missy. We looked up and down every block and nothing. Once in a while she would let out a meow to let us know if we were getting warmer as to where she was, but we were still stumped as to where.

To give a layout of the neighborhood, across the street from our house was a streetlight. The light pole had to be 50 plus feet and made of wood. We had no idea or even thought about looking up for the cat. There were no big trees in the area for her to climb except in our back yard, and that was 10 feet at most, so looking "Up" did not cross our minds.

As we were standing in the street again yelling for the cat, we could hear her. This time it seemed closer. This time she kept meowing as if to be saying, "Look up, I am up here" so I looked up and lo and behold 50 feet above me on top of the light pole was Missy. The top of the light pole had to have been only 12 inches in diameter. Missy had been sitting on the light pole for several days before we realized she was up there. We called the local fire department for them to rescue her, but they said a cat has to be stuck for a certain amount of time before they would come. We called a veterinarian to see if there was any way of coaxing her down. The vet said cats can climb anything, but getting down is another story. He said, “Try leaving food below and eventually she will get hungry and come down”. We did just that. After a couple more days we looked out the window and did not see Missy sitting on the light pole. When the front door opened she came running into the house, and I don’t think she ever went outside after that. To this day I still wonder how she got down. Did she jump, fall, or figure a way to climb down?

Tabby, the Ferocious

This is a tale about Tabby, a large male tabby. He was quite the cat! Our home had several almond trees which attracted squirrels. These squirrels were my nemisis, at least to the extent that they always beat me in harvesting the almonds. Consequently, I was not too upset when Tabby started stalking the squirrels. A couple of times he was successful and we would find squirrel parts around the house (yuck!). The next time that Tabby had caught a squirrel we tried to stop him by squirting him with the hose. The wet cat looked like a drowned rat, but still he held on to his prize. The sad irony was a few years later, after moving from California to Colorado, when Tabby himself became the prey. Tabby's nightly ritual was to go outside for about 20-30 minutes to "take care of business". One night he did not return. Knowing that there were coyotes in the area, we have assumed that they were the instruments of squirrels' revenge for we never saw Tabby again.

Pixie and Her Squirrel

You asked for silly pet stories, and I thought this might get a smile from you. Attached is a picture of my cat, Pixie. She is a known scaredy-cat, literally! She's also not the smartest of animals; my family and I joke that she's a "blond." Anyway, the picture demonstrates just what a chicken she is because she's been treed by a squirrel! (The picture is a little dark. Just follow the direction she is looking; the squirrel is on the right of the trunk.) She was too scared to come down and the squirrel was too scared to go up. :)

Well, besides being treed by a squirrel, Pixie has demonstrated other scaredy-cat tendencies. She is an indoor/outdoor cat. She goes out each morning to play, and comes to the front door and cries to be let in when she wants to eat. One day, she came in as usual and went charging toward the garage door, where we keep her food dish. As she turned the corner, she was met by a pair of discarded shoes. She puffed right up and jumped about two feet in the air, did a 180 and ran back the way she had come. Even though she was hungry, nothing could entice her back into the house for the rest of the day.

The Siamese Twins

One Christmas my wife surprised my son and daughter by buying a pair of siamese kittens, one a Seal Point and the other a Blue Point. Jessica took care of Yanno, the male, and Brad took care of Jixi, the female. As time passed, the two cats became the best of friends.

We have learned from sad experience that these cats, while playing, will trigger the motion detectors in our home. Once, while we were at Lake Powell, we received a call from our security monitoring company that an alarm had been set off. We called some friends who lived close to our home and they checked out the situation. All that they found were the cats who had been playing with their toy mouses.

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