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| Name: |
Tilda
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Age: |
Four years old
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| Gender: |
Female
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Kind: |
Tuxedo Shorthair
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| Home: |
Half Moon Bay, California, USA
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Tilda's story: from feral kitten to lap cat. In the late Spring of 2013, a feral cat had a litter of four kittens at our farm in California. They were born in some large irrigation pipes behind our barn and we visited them often. They were skittish, of course, but we were hoping to become friends. We set out a game camera by a safe trapping cage and gave them food and water daily. We put the food in the trap to get them comfortable with it, intending at some point to catch them to spay them and keep them on the farm as mouse catchers. The mom and three of the litter disappeared, but one stayed whom we named Tilda.
On our daily visits we'd call her name and she would get closer and closer to us and watch us put the food and water out. Over time, when she was around seven months old, she suddenly let us pet her as the second picture shows. Soon, after we fed her she would start following us around the farm and we could then pick her up and walk everywhere. We brought her into the house for short visits and she became accustomed to it. We had a handful of other cats in the house and a Greyhound rescue named Tracker. None of the cats played with her, but they accepted her. She did get along with the dog though and became very comfortable with us. One day, Christine was writing a check and Tilda jumped up on her back and hung out there. It was clear she was firmly on her way to being a house cat.
We installed a cat door just for her in a back room where Tracker slept at night. We left that door open since she still loved going out at night and hunting while the other cats in the front of the house were kept in at night for fear that their city-life personalities wouldn't cope well with the nighttime dangers. We figured as a feral born cat, Tilda had great street sense and that's proven to be true. That said, she's a housecat, too, and she and Tracker are good buddies now as can be seen in the next to last image. When we walk Tracker at night, Tilda often joins us and roams the farm with us, only to come back home to enjoy the warmth of the house and our company.
She's a wonderful cat. We only imagined becoming partly friendly with a feral cat, especially one who was seven months old before she let us pet her, but now she's part of the household and is a snuggly, deeply purring lap cat.
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