Meet my pets

I have loved animals since I was a child. Now I’m the proud “mom” of a dog and three rescue cats and today is World Animal Day, so I’m dedicating today’s post to them.

Kifli, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel

Kifli ([ˈkifli]; Hungarian word meaning ‘crescent’ or ‘croissant’) was born on 25th March 2013 and has been with us since late May of the same year. He went to dog school for a year when he was about a year old due to severe behaviour issues, but now he is a sweetheart. He loves to chase the cats of the neighbourhood if they get into our backyard, but he gets on extremely well with our cats. He has a special relationship with our oldest cat, Mini.

Mini

My now ex-husband and I went to do some grocery shopping one cold and rainy October evening. When we went back to the parking lot, a skateboarder guy warned us that a kitten had crawled into the engine compartment of our car. We managed to pull the kitten out. We weren’t prepared for the sight. She was skin and bones and very sick. We decided to take her home and try to find a forever home for her. We already had an elderly cat and Kifli, so we didn’t want to keep her. We took her to the local veterinary clinic and spent the next few weeks helping her recover. In the meantime, we were looking for a new owner for her, but she was so ugly that nobody wanted to adopt her, so she stayed with us.

Kópé (Hungarian word meaning ‘mischievous’)

We lost Süti in August 2018. Her death came as a shock. She was diagnosed with cancer and five days later she died during surgery. In late October, I saw a post on Facebook about two kittens who had been abandoned on nobody’s land between two villages near our town. I decided to adopt one of them, but my now ex wasn’t happy about the idea. The kittens were about one month old. I took the boy home where it turned out that he was infested with fleas, wasn’t socialised at all and I was about to have a bumpy ride with him. My ex didn’t even want to look at him, Mini was scared of his aggressive outbursts, so I had to handle the whole thing alone. In a few weeks, he learned that he didn’t have to fight for food and became less aggressive. He was still a handful, though, but I didn’t want to give up on him. He’s 6 years old now and he is the weirdest I’ve ever had. For years, he was too afraid to leave the house, so he was meowing at the front door but was scared to death when I opened it. He never purrs but meows a lot and doesn’t like to be pet but likes to be around me, so I have to place an extra chair next to my desk when I sit down to work.

Pajti (Hungarian word meaning ‘buddy’)

Three years ago, on an October evening, my daughter and I just got home from town when we heard desperate meowing from our front yard. It was an orange kitten. We gave him some food and as he was eating I had a feeling that I might have seen this cat before. I posted a photo of him on Facebook and it turned out he was our back neighbour’s cat. I wanted to give him back to his owner and the lady she was planning to get rid of him because her 18-month-old and three-year-old daughters were ‘pulling him and playing with him “playing” with him and he scratched one of the girls, so he had to go. As she described what happened, the girls were basically torturing him because – according to the lady – a pet is for the kids to play with as if it was a stuffed animal and it shouldn’t have boundaries. The kitten was also seriously neglected, not fed properly and sometimes he was locked up in the garage. My daughter, who was almost five at the time – thought that it shouldn’t be the way one treats an animal and started to beg me to keep him, so we did. A few days later, it turned out that he had so many internal parasites that he was throwing up blood, so we took her to the vet. Medications, proper kitten food, lots of love and a large amount of socialisation because, like Kópé, he was super aggressive.

He turned out to be a weirdo, but as I read online, it’s just normal orange cat behaviour. He spends most of his time outdoors and spends the nights in the house. Kópé and Mini litter-trained him, so he’s fine indoors. He catches mice, rats and birds, and loves cucumber and tomatoes, which often drives me nuts because I have to bury his victims and he steals the vegetables from my shopping bag faster than I could put them away. In the morning, he follows my daughter to our car, sits on the roadside and waits until we leave. In the afternoon, he runs home when he hears the engine of my car and greets my daughter. When my daughter and I walk to the convenience store, he walks with us. He has some annoying habits, though. He thinks he’s a jungle warrior and sometimes sits outside when it rains, he prefers to drink from puddles although there’s always fresh water in a bowl for them in the living room. He also taught Kópé not to be scared to go outside, so now they go to the backyard together.

So these are my fur babies. They are close to my heart even when they are annoying and my daughter has great companions in them.