THE CAT IN
OUR BATHTUB
A cat named Izzy is living in my family’s bathtub.
She has no tags and we don’t know where she came from, and probably we never
will, but this is what we do know.
We found Izzy on the night of October? She
was a sad little thing, hungry and damp, with an uncertain future and a fear of humans. We found her under a next-door-neighbor’s
car. She was very nervous about us, and she
ran as soon as we got within 5 feet of her. It
was more when she wasn’t under anything or concealed in any way. We got a bowl of food for her, and tried to make
her eat it, but she wouldn’t, and when it got too late we had to go back to the
house. We fixed her a box to sleep in, with a
blanket in it, cat treats scattered inside, and bowls of food and water nearby.
The next day, we went to our vet’s and we borrowed a little ugly wire
trap that we would try on Izzy that night. Will
was extremely worried about her tail catching in the door when it slammed shut, but Mommy
was confidant that it wouldn’t. That
night, fully equipped with the triggered trap with canned food in it and a blanket over
the top (to make it look less like a trap), we went out to the driveway where, again, we
heard the piteous mewing. We decided, after
many minutes of waiting and watching out on the driveway, that it would be best if we went
inside. So we went inside and watched a movie
to keep us occupied while we waited. Once the
movie was over, we went outside, trying to comfort Will, who, again, was worrying about
her tail. We lifted up the blanket, and we
found that the trap had not gone off, but she had eaten all the food!!! We exclaimed over her cleverness, as we went
inside to go to bed. We decided to leave out
the set trap during the night just in case.
The next morning I woke up and Mommy told us that she had seen that the trap
was closed. Will asked if she had seen a
tail sticking out. She hadn’t. Will then hopefully suggested that we might have
caught a bird. I didn’t think so. After we had breakfast, we went outside. The food in the box that was left from the night
before last was all gone. We took off the
blanket on the trap, and there was a small, damp, scared little cat. We all exclaimed and quickly covered her back up
because she was mewing and backing up as far as she could in the tiny little trap. I immediately went inside and got some tuna, a
long teaspoon, a tall glass of water, and a straw. Using
the straw and the spoon, I put tuna and water in the little dish that we had put food on
the night before. She hungrily looked at it,
but backed up whenever I put the spoon or straw through the bars. Mommy called our vet, and he said that he
didn’t have room to board Izzy. He said
that we would have to train her to like people.
We borrowed a kennel from him, and put her in it.
We put her on our back porch and she was miserable.
She was trying, and trying to get out. She
knocked over her food and her water, and she tracked the sand from her litter box all over
the place and all of that combined turned into a nasty, disgusting sludgy paste that
coated her whole body and the entire kennel. We
moved her to our bathtub and cleaned out the kennel.
She is still in our bathtub.
We moved the clean kennel into the bathtub along with some food, water and a
litter box. She lives there, as happy as can
be. She still eats as fast as a little
monster, but she has learned to like people and we are looking for a good home for her. She loves to purr and knock balls of toilet paper
around the room. She is a very tolerant,
sweet tempered cat, who has either grown up and is very small, or is a teenager cat that
still has some growing to do. I hope that we
find her just the right home, and I like to think how we rescued her from the hard life
she had before we found her. Sometimes I ask
myself if she’s happier here in the bathtub than she was just out in the world. Whenever I pose this question out loud, the
response is immediately “Of course!” But
I still wonder. I think I would like
it much better in a warm, clean environment with plenty of food than in a cold, dirty
place with very unreliable sources of food and water.
But I don’t know how it feels to be an adventurous cat, with nothing
but myself to take care of, and that seeming like a very heavy burden, then, suddenly be
transported to a place where all of that has changed.
I think it would be a relief.
-----------------------------
We found a home for Izzy soon after I wrote this
essay.
She is now happily settled with a new life to
look forward to.
She has 3 other kitty friends and, though her new
people have work and school during the day, 3 people friends. And, I might add, she
has lots more room now then she did in our bathtub!
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