The Little Knittin' Kitten

Claws in the walls

Once again, the cats gave us the slip. Nyron and I were looking for them, still quite baffled that we could only ever find one at a time, if either of them. I knew there must be a hiding place that we didn't know about, and I was right. While we were looking under the basement stairs I heard a rustling sound behind me. I turned around but couldn't figure out where it came from. The only thing directly behind me was a wall: to my right was the boiler room and to my left was the rest of the basement. We searched everywhere and couldn't find Sebastian (the unnamed one was on the main floor) and since Nyron hadn't heard it he quickly dismissed it.

My mind wouldn't leave that sound alone, though, and I knew that they must've found a way to get into the wall. Of course, that's just where we found him. Nyron discovered a hole in the drywall. The drywall in the basement is very water damaged and the hole was covered over from view by the paper that hadn't disolved in the moisture. It took a while to scare him out (and Nyron ended up making that hole bigger and opening up another one) but finally he booked it out of there and upstairs. Nyron covered up the holes and then tried to block up the basement doorway again. By the next morning, they'd found a way back downstairs.

I was doing a search of cat care and behaviour to try and figure out a way to get through this. I want these cats to feel comfortable around us, to become our pets and let us love them. It's hard when they won't let us near. I found a site that tells you what to do when introducing a new cat into the home, and it turns out I did absolutely everything wrong. I let them loose in the house instead of getting them aclimatized to one room at a time, and I introduced them to Spirit right away. Now I'm trying to figure out how to go about fixing this. Should I start over and put them in kitty isolation like I should have at first until they get used to us, or should I let things go as they are and trust that they'll come around in time? The only real problem is that I have a time limit; I'm moving sometime in the next three months and at some point we're going to have to be able to pick them up to get them to the new house. I just don't know what to do.

In less dysfunctional news, Spirit seems to have fully forgiven me for leaving her for a year. The last few nights she's gone back to sleeping in bed with me and she's been a lot more cuddly. At least one of my cats loves me.

=^_^=

posted @ 7:01 p.m.