Kaper

Transcript

Before we moved to the farm, our cat encounters were relatively normal. But when we bought Arcadia, one of the things that happened was people started dropping off their cats at our farm. We didn't meet anybody else who had that happen, but they would drop off these cats, and inevitably they would be pregnant, female cats. At one point, we had two litters of cats going at the farm at the same time, and we would find homes for the kittens, neuter the mom and find a home for her also.

The other thing that was different about being on the farm was we had outside cats, and I had not wanted to have outside cats again. But these were barn cats, and the barn cats were pretty useful. They kept down the rats and the snakes in the barn, and so we got used to having them.

One of our neighbors had a couple of outside cats and they hung out at our place all the time. One of them had a great personality. I really liked this cat and since it was hanging out at our place all the time anyway, I thought well why don’t I see if they'll just give this cat to us, that it makes sense to us to take care of it. The other cat though was what I call a pillow cat, and it was. It was big and fluffy like one of these fluffy pillows and it had about the same level of intelligence. I went over and asked if they'd give me the first cat and they said, no, they wouldn't do it. They loved this cat, and they couldn't part with her. They moved away and they left both cats.

Getting that one cat, I thought was a good thing. The other cat I thought no we don't want to keep this cat. We need to find it a good home. So I put an ad in the paper looking for a good home for this pillow cat, and I'd read that people would adopt cats faster if they had a name. So, I got our book of cat names. That's how many cats we had got their names. I got our book of cat names and decided that this cat would be named Kaper.

While we were waiting for somebody to adopt Kaper, I was sitting on the stoop of our house one day, Kaper was playing in the grass in front of me, and all of a sudden, he jumps up, he lets out this sort of strangled cry and he runs about 10 feet and collapses in the grass.

We called our friend, Tim the vet. He came over. He didn't quite know what was going on. He called his professor back at vet school, and they concluded that this young cat had had a stroke. Tim told us that, with care and time, the cat might recover so we decided to go ahead and take care of the cat, and we knew that this cat would be ours now, so we stopped running the ad and we started taking care of Kaper.

Time was Kaper’s best medicine, but we had one major task that we had to accomplish and that was feeding him because one of the consequences of the stroke was his tongue worked backwards. Instead of allowing food to be channeled to his throat, when you put food in his mouth, his tongue pushed it back out. So my wife, who's one of the greatest people in the world, followed Tim's advice and she would grind up cat food in our blender, put it in a syringe and shoot it to the back of this cat's mouth for two weeks. That's how the cat ate, and that's how the cat survived until its tongue started working the proper way. It got better over time.

Time was the best medicine, but he'd had a number of symptoms for a while. One of his symptoms was that if he was trying to jump up on something, because that's what cats do they jump up on things, if he tried to jump up, instead of going straight on whatever it was, he'd end up going over to the left. It was sort of like a rifle with the site off. He'd shoot and end up the left of whatever he was trying to jump on. After a while, that went away.

But one thing continued for the rest of his life and that was, if a stranger came up and talked to him, his eyes would start ping-ponging back and forth, and his head would start shaking, bobbing up and down, and that would continue until he calmed down. Now, Martha's nephews, who were wiser by half than they should be, nicknamed him Bob because of that, and always were amused with themselves when they came to visit Bob.

Kaper was with us for many, many years, was a great cat, and a great companion, and we were fortunate to have it. Now, Kaper and Fat Freddy were not our most unusual cats. The last cat story I'm going to tell you is about Phoebe, the earless cat, who was in fact our most unusual cat.

Thanks!