solving problems

                                                          vendy

Recently we had a problem at home. The original cause was the beginning of this situation was death of our cat , Vendy. Vendy died of a road traffic accident, trying to cross main road near our house to the other side, for night hunting. At beginning we tried to prevent him from going towards main road by keeping it inside the house.

It was working, until Vendy grew up to be a robust cat  who could climb through the chimney in the kichen and go out to the garden and kill rats, lizards and even birds. we didn’t notice that our preventive mechanism has been outgrown by cat growing up. And also destroying lizards in the garden , who hitherto have been destroying my lemon trees by eating their tender buds, made me look other way from the safety of the cat.

Well , this is not the story I had in mind when I sat down. Its about problem solving. Because Vendy died we started looking for a cat. Not only because we like cats but there is the menacing rats to think of. Rats don’t come to house when you have cats , obvious, but there is less known fact that rats keep away from home for about 3 months even when the cat is dead. This is probably because rats smell the cats presence, even after cat has been absent for about few months.

So we got down to business of  looking for a new cat. Wife contacted her usual contacts; she had one deaf woman who had found her cats several times, but this time she had said kittens are scared these days , must be through sign language. Anyway we couldn’t find a kitten. Time was flying, and we knew we had only two more months until cat smell is wiped off from our house.

As the last resort I posted a SOS on the face book. Many friends tried to help as usual. One of my school friends Eskay came to the rescue. He gave me a call and said he has several kittens and he can give me one. When I conveyed this to my wife she insisted that kitten should be a male. I tried to convince her that a female cat would be as useful as any other cat , no luck. I even told her that female cats are more homely and wouldn’t go to road like Vendy did , to show her that if vendy was a female cat we would be still having Vendy with us. But I must admit I myself was not so convinced about it and the sole purpose of this argument was to avoid bothering Eskey again by making another request. Even that emotional sort of argument couldn’t sway her. So I called Eskay albeit reluctantly and made the request. He agreed at once and after about a week he brought the kitten to my place in his Souped up Honda, emitting thunderous blare.

The real battle has just begun. We have to keep the kitten safe from  Rover, the German shepherd, until dog’s sense  come to the level of, at least minimum toleration towards the kitten. We learned this process when we were bringing up Vendy. We had Vendy in samanthas room because she s not in the country. For about a week Vendy’s world was this room. She was fed there and a plate of sand was kept there for her answer call of nature. Every morning when Rover was in the dog house; he is kept in the dog house from 0830 to 1400 between breakfast and lunch, Timmy was taken out and allowed in the garden with some supervision. To be continued ……..