Gender Balance Restored

Bugs’ ashes were not even returned to us and Cristin was already perusing the Facebook pages of the local shelters.  I wouldn’t call this insensitive, rather she always wanted to adopt another cat and Bugs, as cute as he was to us, was rather unaccepting of any newcomers.  I told her not to involve me because two people shouldn’t go through the guilt of seeing those poor animals and not taking them all home.  She honed in on a group at the Fairhaven shelter and I could tell she was having trouble deciding so I went with her on the second visit.  I put the cats through an intense simulation of life with two kids which involves pulling their tails, holding them upside down, burying your face in their abdomen, etc.

There was one cat that stood out to me as being pretty robust and friendly and he was my recommendation.  Cristin was looking for more of a sad case but these are shelter cats so they are all in need of a home.   In reality, we have kids who don’t really respect the subtle signals that cats put out so my priority was to get a cat that was as complacent as possible.  I let Cristin decide and she came back with what had been my first choice.  His shelter name was Wormy due to the affliction he had on admittance but we changed it to Business, a name which derives from a rather funny response from Ellie some months ago.  The Randy Bachmann song “Taking Care of Business” was on the car radio one day and Cristin had queried Ellie as to the meaning of the song and Ellie had explained simply that it was a song about a man who had a cat named Business and he had to take care of it.  Thus Business, or  “Busy” it was.

Initially we tried to separate Busy from Rudy but this proved to be a hassle so we just left them to figure it out.  This meant that for about a week  Rudy ruled the downstairs and Busy the upstairs. Eventually I brought treats into play and they sniffed each other and that was pretty much the end of the conflict.  They now are more or less buddies, although Cristin is quick to point out that Business doesn’t quite get the level of play out of 12-year old Rudy that he would prefer.  She is pointing this out primarily because she is pushing to go back and adopt that other cat that she was interested in, feeling quite guilty that she left him there.