dog$

There was a place I used to hang out with a few other people. Technically I stayed as a roommate with the guy who owned the place for a few months but what I'm writing about happened after I had come and gone on those terms.

At one point he had a big black cat that always wanted to get outside of the house, and once it did, the guy never let the cat back into the house. While not outwardly abusive, I think it's accurate to say that he wasn't exactly the best pet owner. I was at the place the first day he got the cat as a kitten so the cat has always known me his whole life.

This cat became a twenty pound behemoth and wasn't a fat ass. He was simply an immense animal. It seems that once the cat called the outdoors his home he was belligerent towards any other animal who dared cross its path. The owner told me of a time when the cat was lounging on the front stoop of his place and saw another cat across the street. The fight ensued and once the commotion ended and the dust settled, the challenger scurried away and his cat returned to his stoop and lazily groomed himself as if the incidence was trivial.

One day I'm at the place and I wanted to walk down the block, only about a half of a mile away at most, to go to a gas station and get some soda. I step out of the house and the cat is there and meowing to say hi and such. I tell him I'm going to go get some soda and start walking towards the store. He follows. We make it to the gas station and he stands still at the edge of the parking lot. I go inside and buy my soda. I come out and he's still standing in the spot where I left him. We both summarily walked back to the house.

I thought it was pretty unique for a cat of all things to actually act in such an obedient manner, to be around someone yet still maintain some boundaries as well as having some patience to wait for the person to return to a given spot. I don't think many cats would actually do something like that.

Some time later I was away on vacation and didn't stop over at that place for a while. When I came to the house again, the cat was there after a few hours of me hanging around. The current roommate living at the place said that the cat was absent the entire time while I was gone.

The owner eventually got a relationship and married, and confined the cat to a single unmaintained room in the house during the winter months because it was becoming an issue for the cat to be around the wife and their newly born child. When the time came to move out of the house, the cat was put in a shelter and presumably put down in short order.