This week, the Petfinder photo contest joins other animal blogs for FELINE FRIDAY. This post is long because it anticipates new readers. Most Petfinder posts will be short, focussed on the pets
First, a bit of breaking news...Petfinder sends out e-mails when a special animal they know somebody Out There wants to meet gets into a shelter near their correspondents. Calling all Maine Coon Cat fanciers! Here's your chance to meet two of those great shaggy sassy cats (crossbreeds, but for their young age they are big, shaggy, and sassy) at the Kingsport shelter.
And here's Peaches kitten's page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/peaches-73950912/tn/kingsport/united-states-animal-rescue-tn1062/
They're only summer kittens, barely old enough to be adopted. They may become normal-sized adult cats, the kind who weigh just ten or twelve pounds under the fluff, or extra-large ones--the kind who weigh thirty pounds, and when they put up their paws for a snuggle they're already hugging you around the waist without needing to be picked up.. Both kittens are female. There is some possibility that the shelter is not demanding they be adopted together because both of them are going to be Queen Cats when they grow up.
The wild ancestors of today's domestic cats were, like Norwegian Forest Cats, extra-large, taking up to five years to reach a healthy adult size of twenty to thirty pounds. Some people think that means that extra-large cats will be healthier and more natural. Meh...some are, some aren't. Some big domestic cat bloodlines do include genetic weaknesses--mostly heart disease from what I've heard.
There's a superstition that orange cats are unlucky. Actually it depends on which side of the English Channel your ancestors used to live on. Generally in England orange cats were thought to attract bad luck and black cats good luck, and in France it was the other way round! Could this once have had something to do with the pets kept by the leaders on each side? Is there any scientific basis for this superstition? Well, scientifically, reddish fur is more common in male cats, black fur in females; orange females and black male cats are "normal" but they're minorities. Maybe your choice of superstitions depends on whether you think tomcat odor or kittens is worse luck. However, when you adopt a shelter pet, nearly all shelters' policy will require that the likelihood of both be greatly reduced.
In honor of Peaches, today's cat photo contest is for pale orange, or peaches-and-cream, cats. For new readers, I used to live with a cat who helped me pick three of the best cat photos on Petfinder in a different category each time. Then we expanded the search to dogs. Then Petfinder added some cookies that made the site hard to use and I stopped doing Petfinder photo contests. That could easily happen again, and meanwhile I now live with a cat who disapproves of computers and has never participated in the photo contest...but while it can, this web site tries to increase attention to the adorable, adoptable animals on Petfinder with its weekly photo contest.
It's not unusual for a photo contest winner to be adopted before someone with whom you've shared the photo makes the time to visit the shelter, or meet the foster pet. (Several organizations in the Petfinder network don't even have public shelters.) No worries. They probably have another homeless pet who may well be even more adorable in real life.
For local dog lovers, Petfinder has no special breed alerts. Local dogs up for adoption all seem to be pit bull mixes. Even the ones that are described as some other kind of mix show a generous proportion of pit-bull-like features. Somebody Out There ought to have some love to spare for some of these pit bulls, who did not ask to be bred for sale to teenagers who wanted to look tough and then abandoned when the Navy told them to leave their dogs at home. Petfinder is actually putting some dogs from other places on the local web page just to bring in a little diversity.
I'm glad the shelter rules demand that all these pit bulls be neutered. I miss the days when our local dog population was dominated by friendlier and, to my eyes, better-looking hounds--some beagles and bassets, mostly black-and-tans. However, in honor of the mostly innocent dogs sharing the Kingsport shelter with Jenny and Peaches, this week's dog photos will celebrate a breed that has been excessively and unjustly feared. Pit bull terriers are tough little beasts, and I see them as a homely-looking breed, but they can be good pets if treated kindly and firmly. The general category of medium-to-small dogs called terriers, French for dirt-diggers, were originally bred for an instinct to dig out and devour whole colonies of rats. They can be good watchdogs and baby-sitters too.
Photo picks are arbitrary and in no way determine which pet you, the reader, should adopt or help a petless friend to adopt. I look at photos in only one category each week. Some shelter workers, most of whom are volunteers, take better pictures than others. Your taste may differ from mine anyway, and sometimes I choose among equally adorable finalists by going with the one nearest the top of the Petfinder page as being the one closest to the zipcode specified.
Well, yesterday was a Thursday that felt like a Monday. On Monday Net Galley e-mailed the news that Isabel Allende had written a new novel. Naturally I put my name on the list of would-be reviewers. So on Thursday Random House e-mailed that they'd picked me. I've been picked to write a blurb for a book by Isabel Allende. I SA BEL A LLEN DE! WOOT! Next on my bucket list is writing a blurb for Big Steve! ("King" is not my real-world name, and Stephen King is not a relative so far as anyone knows.)
If you share the quirk of reading books in two languages, side by side, when possible, you already know Isabel Allende. La Casa de los Espiritus, Afrodita (Aphrodite), Zorro, Mi Pais Inventado (My Imaginary Country), more. Some time this winter there'll be a new one on the list. Check Amazon and Bookshop. Meanwhile, this web site continues to present a book a day, some likely to become classics, some fun to read, some...self-published by people who should have consulted a traditional publisher, but it's all good.
Anyway I was reading an extraordinary debut novel, and then I was kvelling and downloading, and then I was called away from the computer...you know how it goes. I did not spend much time link-hunting yesterday. The links I'd started to put in a Web Log were about animals, too, though not pets, so here they are:
Animals, Wild
By way of interference with my attempts to read and write about Hemileuca slosseri, Google got into its head that we all need to see this new photo essay. which does include a photo of H. diana. It really is a splendid photo essay, even if you don't share the author's fascination with beetles. I complained vigorously about its being shoved at me in place of something about H. slosseri when I'd put quotation marks around "hemileuca slosseri" in the search bar, but these pictures were too good not to share, The landscapes are beautiful and there's a kangaroo-rat photo you should probably hide from children, because they will want a kangaroo-rat for a pet, and the species has never adapted to domestication. The essay says nothing about H. slosseri; the author's team don't even go to a place where it lives. This is west Texas and New Mexico.
Among other things, clear close-up photos of a chickadee:
In further news, this week I cut open a tomato that didn't look, feel, or smell overripe. Underripe, if anything. And I nearly dropped it--was that a worm popping out of the cut edge?! No. Upon inspection, this tomato's seeds were sprouting inside it before the tomato even smelled ready to eat. It was one of those days when I wish I had a digital camera.
Out here in the Point of Virginia we finally had some rain, yesterday. We needed it. The water table is way low. The ground and all the fallen leaves were dry as a tinderbox. Someone posted video of a brush fire that got out of hand in the Northern Appalachian mountains. It could easily have happened here--we are used to living in a damp climate, and it makes us careless about the fire safety precautions that are drilled into children out West. Rain reminded me of Hurricane Helene, of which the last rain the Cat Sanctuary had seen was the Edge.
It's still impossible to forget that we got only the Edge. Even in Virginia the flash floods took out some bridges, the deliveryman reported when he brought the cats their Pure Life water. People still need bottled water, and camping and cleaning and household-repair supplies, and clean new school supplies for school-aged children, and trailers and trailer houses as available, and especially M O N E Y. Western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee are still real disaster areas. Come out and be a tourist and see what they're dealing with, if you can. The oak and beech trees on the hills still look gorgeous, the weather is still unusually mild this year, the art scene is still happening.
The resident cats here like to share a bottle of water with me. We have a ritual where I open a bottle, pour a little water into a dish for each cat, and finish the bottle myself. If I don't do this, even in cool weather, by now the Queen Cat Serena looks at me as if to say "Was it something I said?" There are some other brands of bottled water they like, some expensive ones that claim to be from pure mountain springs, and a cheap brand that used to taste better, actually, but then the store had some trouble with a bad batch. So we now officially drink Pure Life, which is filtered tap water actually, but it's endorsed by Serena ni Burr mac Irene ni Candice ni Bisquit ni Polly ni Patchnose, the heir to seven generations of truly extraordinary cats, the first generation of which were found in an alley in Kingsport.
Fictional Kingsport was a spooky, fog-haunted place on the New England coast frequented by the sort of creepy creatures Lovecraft liked to write about. Real Kingsport is a sunny, well planned factory town built on the high ground above a confluence of rivers near the Tennessee-Virginia border; it's been called a colonial town, because there was a small settlement (more than one settler's name was King, and although they didn't found a dynasty they did suggest the most successful of several screen names I've used). There are a few historical records of human activity in Kingsport in colonial, frontier, and Civil War days but it became a real town only about a hundred years ago, when the Eastman Chemical Company and Mead Paper Mill set up factories where they could easily pollute the rivers. J.P. Stevens' cotton mill, the Kingsport Press, and a few other smaller factories moved in too. (They were attracted partly by a claim that the local labor pool was "pure Anglo-Saxon stock." Hah. Local families' pure Anglo-Saxon names were mostly translations from Irish or German. Local families with names like Williams have to look up whether their ancestor was called Williams or MacUilliam or Wilhelm. Or maybe Wilimia, because all the really old families here along "Donelson's Indian Line" had Cherokee ancestors too.) But for a good hundred years, at least, Kingsport was a Model City with everything where it logically ought to be and all within walking distance, not that most Kingsporters actually walked much. They were as car-crazy as Californians. Right up against the Virginia border was a mountainside that was nicknamed Snob Hill because the houses really were built in tiers with bigger, posher houses on every tier as you go up. People who had retired well bought those houses to grow old in, which made it a truly nice neighborhood of comfortably retired old people who looked after one another. My mother bought a house about halfway up. She wanted to "retire" from farming to a neighborhood where she could work part-time as a nurse until she needed a nurse herself, and so she did.
And then some idiot decided that what the town needed was to attract a few billionnaires, so he asked a billionnaire what to change, during the early years of this web site, and the billionnaire said, "Put in some high-rise apartments and get federal grant money for housing some welfare families from Knoxville or Chattanooga." The apartment blocks were put in at the base of Snob Hill. Around the time Mother died, Snob Hill became a scary neighborhood with addicts dying slowly, from tuberculosis and AIDS as well as sickle-cell anemia, in puddles of filth on the pavement because they've become too sick to find their way home. Gawrsh. Kingsporters don't seem to know what to do about this. They've grown up, in some cases their grandparents grew up, in a city that never had slums before. It was planned to have cheap little "starter houses" for entry-level factory laborers, but its low-income neighborhoods were always clean places. People complained about wanting more space, nicer stuff, better jobs, not about living in slums. And now they have a real slum, with homeless addicts and all. Some of them are wringing their hands and wailing "Oh, woe, we must escape to Gate City," and though they have relatives in Gate City and have always been welcome to shop and visit here, they do encounter people like me saying they ought not to want to live here. Stout hearts and true, hold fast what is yours! Many of you like the "MAGA" motto--well, make Kingsport great again. Put in better factories; give your new townsfolk, the sober ones who wanted to get out of Knoxville and make their lives better, decent jobs! That billionnaire never intended to live in Kingsport or had any loyalty to Kingsport, but you Kingsporters should have some. The world needs more fortitude.
That's a separate rant. What needs to be mentioned about Kingsport, in this blog post, is that it's a place where extraordinary cats are found--offered "free to good homes" as kittens, or allowed to stray in alleys. Listening cats. The odd jobs man in my neighborhood said recently, "Once I had a cat, a tomcat, that would do what I told him to do. Most cats aren't like that and I don't like them." Well, if you want a cat that hears and learns enough words that it can follow some simple instructions from you--you can sit or nap here, don't go there, leave my cardinals alone--Kingsport is where an unusual number of cats like that have been found. They're not a breed, in fact they're a mad mixture with different breed types, but there is a social cat community. I don't know whether Jenny or Peaches is more intelligent or social than the average cat, but I know there are confirmed cases of cats who rear kittens communally and hunt in teams being found in the Kingsport shelter.
Not that the Kingsport shelter normally wins any prizes for pet photography, because they tend to post cluttered pictures with cutesy-wutesy lettering and computer graphics instead of a good clear focus on the animal. I judge that sort of thing harshly in the photo contests.
These photos are for sharing. Some of the Petfinder pages offer videos, also for sharing. Post them on social media. (If you're not on Bluesky yet, go to bsky.app and consider yourself invited.)
Enough verbiage. Time for the best pale orange cat and pit bull mix dog photos in the Eastern States.
Zipcode 10101: Beanbag from New York City
Though not fat, Beanbag is a large cat--not gigantic--he weighs about twenty pounds. He was born about twelve years ago. He's an indoor cat who likes to be close to humans. In fact he's outlived a few, and changes in his humans' daily routine make him nervous. He's said to like children as long as they admire him but don't try to tickle his underside.
Zipcode 20202: Eden and Mack from Arlington
Their web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/eden-n-mack-fluffy-friends-72447236/va/arlington/home-alone-feline-rescue-va219/
Eden and Mack are believed to be Maine Coon mixes like the kittens above. They were spring kittens but are the size of adult cats. They will probably grow bigger--how much bigger, you'll find out. They may be cousins but are not siblings. Like our Serena and don't-try-to-tell-her-he-wasn't-her-brother Traveller, they met at a foster home and bonded for life. They are inseparable and must be adopted together. Eden is the female--and Eden is also the orange tabby. They will not produce more kittens.
Zipcode 30303: Turtle and Yertle from Decatur
Mother (Yertle, the Tortie) and son (Turtle, the orange tabby) can be adopted separately or together. Both have been neutered. A head shot of Turtle alone was the clearest photo on the page; this photo of him with his mother is less perfect, artistically, but contains valuable information for prospective adopters.
DOGS
To link up on Feline Fridays we have to include the cats every week. So we have to include dogs during the cats' week, too.
Zipcode 10101: Bonnie from Texas
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/bonnie-tx-72460899/ny/new-york/rescue-dogs-rock-nyc-ny1274/
Petfinder allows animals from low-traffic rural shelters to be cross-posted for adoption in cities, on the condition that the urban adopter pay for delivery. If you're actually in Texas you could skip a few steps and save some money. E-mail the shelter to find out what part of Texas she's in. Bonnie is believed to be about three years old and a sweet, friendly dog who loves to walk, run, and play ball with her human. Nobody calls anything "Bonnie" unless they believe it's both good and beautiful.
Zipcode 20202: Kya from DC
Kya is said to be a sweet, shy, conservatve dog who takes some time adjusting to changes. Her bounce and playfulness will reappear as she gets to know you. They're begging someone, please, to adopt her before she starts thinking of a shelter as her home. She withdrew and mourned for some time after being moved to the shelter, but withdrawn and mournful are not her real personality.
Zipcode 30303: Gretel from Atlanta
This spring puppy, who already weighs 37 pounds, is in foster care where she gets along well with other dogs. About cats and children, they can't say. She's good at walking at heel on a leash and also likes chasing and fetching.
