I gotta say that the wild gene or not makes all the difference. I chose two purebred cats, a Bengal and and Abyssinian who came home with me at 6 weeks. They lived with me as my constant companions at home for 20 and 19 years. When you get a cat who is bred into a loving family who socializes them after birth to love humans, you can enter into feline intelligence, and it is a wonderland. Without the prefontal cortex restraints on their emotional lives, they can focus a love beam on you that is heart melting and powerful. My kitties lived to please me and learned many tricks. But what always amazed visitors the most was the stream of communication through their eyes. Constantly monitoring me as I was them. It was the opposite of cold and distant, I never saw that behavior from them. They came when I called them every time. It was high bandwidth flow and I miss it dearly.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <awoelflebater@...> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> wrote : That's cool Curtis. Yes, of course the cat likes my wife who is the provider of food. And I will sometimes insist on petting it, and then it can't resist the scratching under the chin, and will even start purring, but then it forgets that episode in a matter of minutes. I just feel cheated, because they are always a few minutes when I want to sit and watch some TV with a kitty on my lap, but he's chillin in some other corner of the house. In my experience cats are still wild animals. They like certain comforts and so avail themselves of those things when readily accessible and when not too inconvenient. I never owned a cat except when I adopted a couple of brother kittens for a barn I owned. They were both feral and the SPCA wanted to put them down rather than adopt them out to an 'outside/outdoor' home. I sent a friend back in and had her embellish the truth about where the two kittens were going so that I could bring them to the farm. It worked, we adopted these two brothers who I named "Dylan" and "Thomas" and they lived happily ever after eating organic cat food, seeing the vet regularly and even when Dylan got his tail mysteriously broken I spent the $600 to have it amputated and tended to (it broke right at the base of the poor guy's spine). But to be perfectly honest with you, I am not a cat fan. They live a little bit too much in their own world to be as accessible as I would like them to be in order to be able to consider them an actual "pet". They can be unpredictable, cold, distant and unavailable just when you were hoping for a little lovin'. They are amazing creatures and very beautiful in their form and their agility. They are so wonderfully creepy sometimes too when they hop sideways all arched up and stiff-legged. So I get where you're coming from, Steve. Having a cat that won't trust and really love you after ten years is pushing the definition of "pet" past the point of no return.
