Gracie

Written on February 11, 2009 – 8:33 pm | by maxine |

Hi! I’m Gracie. Some people don’t like black cats, but I guess that is because they have never met me!! I am pure black in colour, with gorgeous, sleek, short hair, beautiful eyes, and a disposition to match. I love to be petted. I have to admit, I am a little shy and life has not always been easy, but I really enjoy life now. As of February 2009, the vet says I am about 14 or 15 years old. I used to live with Tom before he died of cancer in May 2008. I was always an indoor/outdoor cat and often was outside for weeks at a time when Tom was in the hospital for long periods. I hated it. When Maxine rescued me, I was so scared, but so very thankful. Princess and I lived with two others of Tom’s cats in a foster home for a couple of months and we pretty much hid in the basement while we waited for someone to adopt us. But nobody wanted an older cat, much less a black one! Then we lived for a couple of more months in Maxine’s basement and two of the cats were adopted out. Finally, that glorious day came when Bob told Princess and me to come up into the house where it was warmer and cozier since winter was coming on. It has taken quite a bit of time for the other cats to accept me, but I am staying put – no more going out and fending for myself in the cold, cruel world!

They feed me well, give me healthly supplements, and give me a nice warm place to finally call home. I have even gotten to be comfortable around the dogs and play tag with them some days. My person is Maxine and I follow her just about everywhere in the house.

I think that my favorite part of being here is that I don’t have to use a litter box any more! At Tom’s house we had a clay litter and that was downright awful. It would get caught in my claws and I would track it all through the house. Then, using a box that other cats had used – how disgusting is that? I, by nature, am fastidiously clean. At my new home I am delighted to say we have options!! In fact, there are several options. When I first came, we were using The World’s Best Kitty Litter, which is a corn based flushable litter – much nicer than clay litter and more environmentally friendly. By the way, did you know that most of us cats prefer to do the two different eliminations – shall we say “wet” and “dry” – in two different spots and not in the same one, especially if litter is involved? With that in mind, and with six cats to reckon with, we have “different strokes for different folks” or, perhaps that should be said as, “different designs for different felines.” We are now pretty much litter free! Yup, that is right – litter free!!

We now use the Litter Kwitter system. Ordinarily it requires the kitty to jump up onto a standard people toilet seat that has been covered with a specially designed Litter Kwitter seat. We then can do our business in the toilet. However, because Chester is, shall we say, developmentally challenged, and Buzz is stubborn, our people had to come up with a different approach. So, they have affixed the Litter Kwitter to a bucket which is lower than a toilet and which Chester can get onto. Then we did a take-off on the Litter Kwitter by rigging up another bucket and a toilet seat that some of us cats use. We also have a completely different system called the “Cat Potty” which is normally used with litter in it but which we, being the intelligent felines we are, have adapted to quite nicely with just water in it. The water in our Litter Kwitter bucket, the “Cat Potty”, and the bucket we affectionately call the “pee station” gets emptied every day or two. The beauty of it is, there is NEVER any odour! In fact, a furniture repair man was in just the other day and commented that he would never have guessed there were cats living in the house because there was no smell of urine! He was very impressed. For Chester, the family created a laundry tub “toilet” that they cut the side out of for an entrance and he pees down the drain hole that has a small pot directly under it. He likes a little of the World’s Best litter sprinkled around the hole to remind him where to aim but hey, it works!

I don’t know if the saying is true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but, us cats, young and old, are certainly getting the hang of learning new tricks! If you insist on using a kitty litter, be sure to get the multi-cat formula World’s Best Kitty Litter. We definitely prefer it because of it’s clumping properties over the regular single cat formula which can get a little gooey when it gets wet. And remember, the flushable corn based litter is environmentally friendly and won’t mess up your kitty’s digestive system like clay litter does when they clean their paws.

A bonus: When we use the Litter Kwitter water based system, when we make a mistake and jump up onto your table, you know what our paws have NOT been into!