Being a Cat Mom is Full of Surprises

Getting Presents from Your Cat is Fun… And sometimes getting a present from them is quite surprising. Like this instance about a year ago, when one of our four kitties brought me a live baby turtle as a gift.

And, as you can see, the little guy wasn’t too thrilled about this.

I was both horrified and amazed that they was alive. Our family cats—especially the two youngsters, which are often jokingly referred to as “my children” by the rest of the family (since I’ve raised them both)—have track records. One of them, Boots, has single-handedly wiped at least 4 birds off the census this year. Her sister Dina isn’t as bad, but she’s still got her own body count of squirrels… So, seeing this little guy very much alive and without a single scratch on him was quite a shock!

Was I relieved? Yes, absolutely! For once, one of their victims was alive. However, there was a slight dilemma… Being that there were no lakes, ponds, or rivers anywhere significantly close to us. The closest one was a lake down the road and on the other side of the apartment complex we lived in back then. As much as we knew the cats wandered… We were quite sure they had never gone that far. They like to stick close to home.

After the initial surprise, picture taking, and showcasing to the family, the magical question became: Where the heck did this turtle come from?!

Eventually, my father suggested a possible reason for this… And it both made me happy and mortified all over again. Why? Well, he suggested that the turtle was originally going to be food for a bird of prey, such as a hawk. That made sense to me, but also made me quite shaken. If that was the case, this poor little guy was very far away from home. Not to mention he had somehow survived a fall out of the sky at God knows how high… Only to be snatched up by one of my dang cats and brought back to me like a trophy.

Yea… I don’t blame him for being grumpy. He went through quite a journey that day!

Once this conundrum was mostly solved, I finally got the OK from my parents to go scramble to that lake I had mentioned and safely deposit the baby turtle into the water. The little guy sat there for a few moments as if taking it all in and collecting himself before he shot into the deeper water and disappeared.

As mentioned, it's been over a year since then; we live in Georgia now, a good couple of hours away from that condo complex. I’m unsure of that turtle’s fate, but I sure hope he’s still alive and thriving! My hat goes off to you, little turtle!

Of course, in classical fashion, he was the first of many "gifts" I was presented with. He also wasn't the only baby turtle the cats dumped on our doorstep, either… I shudder to think of how lucky those three little guys were. Dina was mostly the one doing most of the gift-giving; her sister Boots just… Killed and occasionally ate things.

In total, I believe I remember Dina bringing me: Those three baby turtles, four anoles in various end-of-life stages in no thanks to her at all, a dead bird, and leaves… Lots and lots of leaves. And a stick, for some reason. I was convinced during that episode that she was determined to act like a dog.

Truly, I didn't think I would wind up receiving gifts from any of our cats, let alone the two crazy furballs I hand-reared from kittenhood. Both of my beloved cat sisters were always a bit too strange and "out there" compared to other cats for me to expect any kind of normal cat behavior from them. Dina, as I mentioned, likes to periodically act like a dog, chase ghosts around the house and backyard, and overall randomly have moments of absolute insanity and chaos where she bounces off the walls for no reason. Boots is… Angry. All the time. There is never not a moment in her prissy little life that she isn't giving everyone in the household mixed signals. I can honestly say Boots hates everyone and everything but tolerates me as her mommy and the family as just that: Her weird, stupid family.

Basically, they are just weird and don't have enough "normal" cat tendencies for me to expect them to do anything even remotely normal. Yet, once they reached around a year and a half old respectively, the gifts started… And then the obliteration of birds and squirrels started soon after we moved to Georgia. So maybe there is hope for them, yet! We'll see~