It all started when I took the Laptop of Then home and looked at "cached" web pages while the Queen Cat of Then, Heather, was being encouraged to curl up and purr beside me. Heather would look at the laptop, and though she didn't mistake pictures for real things in the room or try to swat the cursor, she did seem to recognize cat pictures as images of other cats. She'd look at cat pictures and usually point her ears slightly toward them, showing mild interest, not alarm or hostility. I thought it was cute to make a post that suggested that a cat an e-friend's local shelter was finding hard to place might become an "e-friend for Heather." Publicity got that cat (a crotchety senior cat) a home, and Heather and I then started picking the cutest cat photos near the zipcodes 10101, 20202, and 30303--New York, Washington, and Atlanta.
The rule was that we, or more often just I, would look for photos of the type of animal first mentioned by an e-friend or Tweep during each online session. If the first animal content I found online came from Mudpie's Human (the blogger who started it all), I'd pick the cutest three-colored cat pictures. If it came from LB Johnson, I'd pick the most photogenic black dogs or retriever-type dogs. And so on.
The cool part was that Twitter would automatically display one of the pet photos, people would retweet the cute animal picture, and the next time I'd look at pictures of that type of animal, that one would no longer be in the shelter. (Usually. There was one beautiful cat, who looked a lot like Heather, who the shelter staff said just wasn't friendly; people who saw her picture would decide to adopt some other three-colored cat instead.) We were actually helping animals find homes! Heather really was pleased...because other people were adopting those cats, so they weren't moving in with us. Heather was a gracious Queen of a Cat Sanctuary but she had a way of looking at other cats, just to let them know who was Queen, that caused several prospective temporary residents to sprint half a mile. Even some human readers, seeing Heather's "Excuse me, I happen to be the Queen Cat here" expression, thought she looked "mean."
Nah. Miffed is the word. I never saw Heather looking seriously angry, or wanted to. She was a gentle, goodhearted cat who once lost her own kittens by trying to adopt some orphaned kittens too completely, too quickly. She was extremely social, and failed to develop some of the standard adult cat survival skills by relying on her friends to do things like supplying enough milk for all the kittens or even cleaning the fur on Heather's head. The one time she encountered a cat who really was hostile, her attitude seemed to be "Is this even possible? What can you do in such an unnatural situation--an antisocial cat!" But when she reached her full size she was a serious predator--the hunter for the family. Most other cats didn't want to mess with her. She always seemed to wish other cats well, and to understand that their well-being included plenty of space.
Heather grew older and dozier, spent more time indoors but still wanted to spend most of her time outdoors, and was eventually caught in extreme weather. She was survived by a foster kitten, Samantha Scaredycat, and a nephew, Burr, who produced our current Queen Serena. Serena really can be a tough disciplinarian, though not mean. And she's shown subzero potential for ever actually participating in any cute little rituals of helping pick out cute pictures to show on this web site. Serena disapproves of electronic screens; that's why there aren't more pictures of her, though she knows she has a pretty face and likes to be admired.
In that picture, taken before she was even half grown, Serena was asserting ownership of Samantha's Safe Place. She's usually nice about it but she is the most dominant social cat I've ever known. (Often social cats don't seem to have a hierarchy.) She loves other cats as long as they're completely submissive, subordinate followers who don't get any ideas about e.g. snuggling up to her human. Possibly that's why, on seeing a glimpse of her own reflection in a screen, Serena either moves away from a full-sized image, growling and hissing, or wants to play roughly with a miniature image such as a digital camera phone. She probably sees herself as either a hostile intruder, or a very bratty kitten who needs a lot of slapping around. No other living cat has ever replied to Serena's normal body language with equal assertiveness, and if one did, fur would probably fly.
But with humans, at least, the Petfinder links were extremely popular, and seemed to be doing some good, so I continued doing them without Heather's input until Petfinder redesigned their web site and added some cookies that the cookie-cleaning software on the Laptop of Then was not able to clean away. This made using them a violation of our Google Contract of Then: This web site's contract forbids us to use links that might adversely affect people's computers' performance, i.e. links to sites that use messy cookies.
But guess what's happened? I have a new laptop with newer cookie-cleaning software. Google has changed their coding to include newer cookie-cleaning software. I can now visit Petfinder without picking up messy cookie crumbs. That does not necessarily guarantee that everyone can, so the following Petfinder link is only a test. If it opens slowly or strangely, or the link works slowly or strangely, for any readers Out There, please let me know, and I won't do more Petfinder links.
Here, in any case, is Claudia from Blountville, Tennessee, nonverbally saying "Please give me a decent home, away from this lunatic who wants to drape beads around me."
Can you resist that eyeroll? If not, click here. That shelter near the Tri-Cities Airport in Tennessee is a long drive from anywhere but it's where I found Dusty, the legendary Queen of the Yuma Cat Sanctuary, and it's where shelter staff found and documented a pair of social cat cousins whose bonding was remarkable enough to be written up in the newspapers. Claudia is a full-grown cat, which means she'll take longer to become a real part of your family than a kitten would, but also means she's already received the routine veterinary care, including spaying, necessary before you can take her home.
If I don't receive complaints from readers, the Petfinder links will return.
(For those who don't know, that straw-gray tabby coloring with patches of yellow makes Claudia what some people now call a "Torbie"--a combination of tabby and tortoiseshell. I don't know that there is a stereotype of what's considered a typical Torbie personality yet. I know our Mackerel was a big, tough, independent, sweet, super-social Torbie tom who lived in the woods and spent quality time with all the different families who loved him, and Suzie, the Queen of the Jackson Street Cat Sanctuary for many years, was a long, lean, mean-faced but sweet-natured Torbie who spent lots of time warming a sick patient's feet. So the common characteristic for both of the Torbies I've known was that they were unusually kind cats, but I don't know that that's really typical.)
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