Such a Jezebel

Last week my husband and I took our cat Jezebel to the SPCA to be put down. She was 20 years old and I always thought of her as my familiar in the sense that witches were supposed to have familiars back in the day. She and I both had a brown spot in one eye, which I decided marked us as kindred spirits.

She was kind of a bitch - we had her and her twin sister Jasmine for 14 years, and poor Jasmine was totally dominated. If you were petting Jasmine, Jezebel would come up behind her and just sit there. And Jasmine would get all "oh, yeah, I forgot - I don't deserve loving!" and run away. And Jezebel would attack Jasmine for no real reason, and hog their food and try to make sure she didn't get treats. We did our best to even things out, but it was a bit of a battle.

I still loved her though. She was very feisty and opinionated and bold. When Jasmine died six years ago, Jezebel came into her own. She was so happy to be an only cat. As someone with lots of siblings, I kind of identified. Of course, I am now very grateful for all my remaining siblings, but there were certainly times when I was a kid when you could have had them all, thank you very much. So that was sort of endearing to me.

So what is a memorial for a 20 year old cat doing on a blog about peeves? Well, when we were looking for new cats, we got shot down for some cats that we saw at PetSmart. Apparently, having a 20 year old cat is not a good enough reference for some rescue groups.

Yeah, our cat was out of code. We took Jasmine and Jezebel to the vet when they were younger, but they were house cats and our vet wasn't too worried about vaccinating them. And let's face it - they HATED the car and getting them into their carrier was a nightmare. So we did not have good vet references for the cats, and we got shot down.

My husband was furious ("how DARE those &*^$#%*^ say we're not good pet owners!" to paraphrase a few of the choicer phrases he spewed. I was mortified. I had been found to be inadequate by perfect strangers - a life-long nightmare of mine. It took me days to work through that one.

I was talking to a friend whose daughter works at a shelter about the ignominy of having been shot down for cats. She said that her daughter told her that people lie all the time on applications for pets. I had thought about doing that. If I said we only had a dog, we had fabulous vet references - I keep my dog legal. But no, I went with honesty. And that turned out to be a mistake. My friend said "the liars get the cats" and we laughed because that is so true! In life and most places - the liars get the cats.

So - we did not get the cats from the rescue group. They are no longer at PetSmart, so hopefully they found a nice home -- maybe even with honest people. We did manage to get some cats from the SPCA. (I tried to post a photo, but blogger was fighting me and I gave up. They are 1 year-old males - a brown and an orange tabby. Optimus Prime and Bumblebee - obviously named by some Transformer fans.)

I think the rescue group missed an opportunity for education. In the process of trying to adopt from them, I did learn that there is a law in my state requiring cats to have rabies vaccinations. I never knew that.

We really liked the cats they had. We even volunteered to be on cat-owner probation, but when the rescue group found out that we had taken Jezebel to the SPCA to be put down, they decided that we were irredeemable.

So - now we have two other cats, and have learned that cats need to be vaccinated for rabies to stay legal in PA. Also that the liars get the cats. And that some people think it's better to judge than to teach. All things to keep in mind as we transition into the next phase.

'm out.