EGN and ABC

We have cats in our house, so we are occasionally a magnet for cats outside the house. They smell the food, they smell the cats, and they used to smell the catnip growing by the front door until I stopped growing it.

For the past couple of years, our visitors have been EGN and ABC.

ABC was an Abyssinian male about a year old who showed up one day outside the bay window of the dining room, leaping at butterflies that were fluttering around a pentas. When I found his family, who also have four children, they said they paid about $600 dollars for him, and the breeder from whom they bought him had already declawed him. He was making them crazy demanding to go outdoors, so they let him out during the day. I haven't seen him for at least six months. Either they have made him stay in, or he has run off or perished. With no claws and a silly disposition, he had not much in the way of street smarts or defenses. He was beautiful tawny irridescent brown. I could understand why they loved him.

EGN is a black shorthair male, about three years old now, who showed up two years ago during Thanksgiving and then again at Christmas. He also showed up at spring break. I never was able to find his family, although the family next door to ABC's family had lost a kitten almost a year before he appeared. ABC's family also has an outdoor cat they feed out the back door; the mother came over to look at EGN, and he let her pick him up, but she said he is not their outdoor cat. He may be eating some of their cat's food and getting by. Bob named him El Gato Negro. In the past, he demanded to be let into the house, threw himself against the windows, and tore the screens. Until Saturday, I had not seen him since last Christmas. My theory is that, if he does have a family other than ABC's, they go out of town for the holidays and leave him outdoors with a big bowl of dry food, filled up by a friend or neighbor. Raccoons and possums eat his dry food and he is going hungry. This morning when I went down to the street to get the paper before dawn, a small dark shape dashed from our front yard across the street. It was probably EGN. He still looks healthy and fit, so I am pretty sure he has a family most of the year.

Whenever a cat shows up and acts lost I feel responsible, not just out of sympathy for the cat but also because birds and lizards are at risk from a stray cat, as are our own cats. Then I start to see a pattern that makes me believe there are other people feeding these cats.