Tag Archives: cats

July 24, 2007 · 5:40 pm

Valentino Alone

Garbo.Tino.2007

Our 12-year-old cat Garbo died from cancer last week. I wrote about her in my  18 July 2007 blog entry. We buried her in the backyard and held a small family ceremony. Jessica sang the prayer of St. Francis using the tune by Sarah McLachlan

    Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
    where there is hatred, let me sow love;
    where there is injury, pardon;
    where there is doubt, faith;
    where there is despair, hope;
    where there is darkness, light;
    and where there is sadness, joy.
    O Divine Master,
    grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
    to be understood, as to understand;
    to be loved, as to love;
    for it is in giving that we receive,
    it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
    and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
    Amen.

Garbo’s litter mate Valentino and our whole family miss her.  Tino knows there is something wrong, someone missing, and he keeps hunting around and crying. We are spending a great deal of time comforting Tino.

Valentino-2007

Images Copyright 2006-2007 by John Plocher

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July 18, 2007 · 1:46 pm

Garbo Dying

When my mother was a young married woman (before she had kids), she worked in a bank in Hollywood. She tells us that she looked forward to seeing one of her bank’s shyest customers, the lovely silent film star Greta Garbo.

Twelve years ago, my family adopted two striped gray kittens with huge green eyes and black eyelids. Their eyes reminded me of the movie makeup of the silent film stars. So, we named the kitties Greta Garbo and Rudolf Valentino, or Garbo and Tino for short. Here are photos from last year:

Garbo:
Garbo Cat photo: copyright 2006 John Plocher		 Garbo and Tino:
Garbo and Tino Cat photo: copyright 2006 Katy Dickinson

In 1995, we rescued these two as kittens abandoned at Donner Pass (elevation 7,085 feet). We were driving home from a week of camping and had stopped for coffee. While we waited, we saw a tiny gray kitten playing among the barstools. The bartender said that the kitten and her brother had been left by the highway the week before. They were sleeping in the woodpile, hiding out from the racoons. This was in early September and snow was due within two weeks. We took the kittens home, cut the pine tar out of their fur, and added them to our family.

When we came home from vacation last month, Garbo was clearly very ill. We have been taking her to the vet for weeks but yesterday she was diagnosed with incurable, inoperable cancer. We are trying one last medicine but even if that works, it will at best give us a few months before Garbo dies. We may have to ask the vet to put her to sleep this week if the medicine does not help.

Garbo and Tino are enjoying canned tuna (their special treat) and lots of combing and loving in the time we have left. Even though she feels bad and has much of her fur shaved off for the medical tests, Garbo is a sweet and lovely cat. This is my small tribute to our loving pet. We will miss Garbo.

Images Copyright 2006 by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher

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June 22, 2005 · 4:13 pm

Feral Cats on the Guadalupe River

Our yard has recently become the home of a small colony of feral cats. It started with one mostly-white calico female and then of course she had babies… We have always had indoor cats of our own. The residents for many years now are Garbo and Valentino, two grey fur persons whom we love. We adopted them many years ago from a road stop at Donner Pass where they had been abandoned as kittens. Now, dealing with this small furry invasion to our yard has caused a crisis of sorts. The little cat poops on the lawn, cats digging in my flower pots, cat fur on our porch chairs, the white flashes of fur scrambling to get away as I round the corner are all new and unwelcome additions to daily life.

We first called the local San Jose Animal Services and at their recommendation we rented a humane trap. The idea was to catch the kittens so that they could be put up for adoption. We also hoped to catch Mama Cat so that she could be spayed and vaccinated and returned to defend her territory. We have learned a great deal since then!

It turns out that the Guadalupe River may have water in it but it is really a river of cats moving around San Jose. Also, this is kitten season. Also, the animal agencies and societies run out of money at this time of year and there is a 2 week waiting period to fix ferals. (Who ever heard of holding onto a feral cat for 2 weeks to wait for an appointment?) The reality is that if you take kittens in to an agency at this time of year, they almost certainly get killed. There are just too many tame and healthy cats available to adopt.

We have talked with (or tried to contact) many organizations: Pets in Need, Fix Our Ferals, Silicon Valley Friends of Ferals, the Peninsula Humane Society, and Itty Bitty Orphan Kitty Rescue, among others. The most helpful was Itty Bitty Orphan Kitty Rescue and Silicon Valley Friends of Ferals. Some offered good timely advice. Many don’t respond to email or voice mail. We have trapped 5 kittens and 1 adult (not the mother) and taken them in. Yesterday, we drove about 80 miles round trip before work to the only organization we could find that would take feral cats in right away. Most of the kittens were sick and underweight and the adult was too sick to spay – they said she would not survive anesthesia. Probably all are dead now. It is sad and very discouraging.

We still hope to be able to have one or two healthy-and-unfertile feral cats as permanent residents on our bank of the river but this is harder to arrange than we thought.

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