Ben and Betty

I think I’ve mentioned before that Mike and I live with six cats and three dogs. Let me introduce two to you, Ben and Betty. Ben is the gray striped and Betty the calico cat pictured above. Ben was an alley cat that I used to see around the old neighborhood we used to live in that had tons of alley cats. Most ran when approached, as did Ben. He was probably about a year old at the time he decided that maybe humans could be trusted, or else he was just so tired of the life of running in the streets. Or he was hungry. Who knows what goes on in the kitty mind?

That day he decided to trust humans, Mike and I were sitting on the front porch chatting when Ben comes walking up our sidewalk and onto our porch and allows, no demands, that we pet him. Well, we were pleased since we are both suckers for critters. We already had five indoor cats mind you, we were not suffering a feline shortage. And we had a “hospitality tray” as Mike named the outdoor feeding trough we installed on our porch.

Most of the cats who frequented the trough were trapped and spayed/neutered and returned to their wild lives. But Ben didn’t seem to be interested in eating and running. We soon discovered that he had a family when his “wife” and “kids” began hanging out in our backyard with him. We got them all fixed and let them have the yard. A friend of Ben’s also started hanging out so he got fixed too. We had quite a party out there.

But I was becoming quite worried that they bunch of them were getting too careless about crossing the street without looking both ways and wanted to bring them in. We had lost a couple of the indoor cats to old age and disease and I didn’t want to scrape one or more of the outdoor cats off of the street. So, after testing for feline diseases of the incurable kind, Ben, Mom, Betty and Veronica were introduced to the joys of being an indoor cat.

Mom didn’t last long, disease of some sort took her away too soon. Ben and the girls are still with us, along with a couple of others we’ve picked up along the way. I’ll tell you about some of the others another day. Pet your critters!

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