#cat care

I saw this in the tags with @grayathena and I wanted to explain a couple things about Ollie.

I’m not upset about this comment, because you are 100% correct. If I could start over again, I would’ve kept Oliver as an indoor cat.

We got him as a rescue. His mom was abandoned by her family and he was outdoor with no human contact for the first 10 weeks of his life.

While I call him “my cat” he was technically my parents. We live in the country side, and my step dad has only ever known outdoor cats and thought it would help Ollie adjust better to give him the freedom.

Since Ollie had most of his survival skills from when he was abdonned, he LOVED being outdoors. Hunting and sunbathing were his two favorite things. However, I have no doubt that if we had actually made an effort to train him to be indoors when he was still young, he could’ve been.

But it always worried me. He’d come home quite frequently with little cuts on his ears and neck (thankfully nothing too deep). He got worms frequently from eating birds, mice, and squirrel and was on worm meds quite often. He wasn’t as socialized as he would’ve been if he spent more time around us.

It wasn’t until after Ollie’s death and my twin put her foot down about our other cats, her cats, being indoor cats that my mom fully realized. Even then, my step dad still didn’t seem to understand and kept “accidentally” letting them out.

Learn from my mistakes. Keep your cats indoors and PLEASE use more humane methods of pest control as poisons and fatal traps can easily kill domestic animals too.