My Critters

Butter ~ The Cat

Update: On March 15, 2007, my darling Butter passed away from liver failure. I will miss her so terribly, but I will be forever grateful that she blessed me with the spirit of her life for 16 years. In honor of her, I wrote a poem, Memories of Butter. End Update |

This is my beautiful Butter
Butter is my cat, my Squish, my Sweet lil' Ol' Lady ~ ...Butter and the way I got her is a very special story... It began in late December of 1991. I was working at the Humane Society in Santa Clara, CA, and yes, they did euthanasia there. Butter was a tiny kitten, feral, sick and very scared. The age limit for pets to be adopted was 8 weeks. Butter was about 6, and because she was sick and too feral, she could not be taken home by a kennel worker to be fostered, that is, cared for until she came of appropriate age for pet adoption. Her destiny appeared to be death by euthanasia. My heart went out to her.

I have a severe weakness for people or critters being defenseless and/or scared, and she was both. I wanted to save her. Because I had a close relationship with my immediate supervisor, I was able to share my feelings about her. He knew me and how I was. She was scheduled to be put down on Thursday, January 2, 1992. I worked the day before, which was New Years Day. I always worked holidays to be with the animals. Anyway, at the end of my shift, my supervisor and friend came up to me and said, “Before you go, I want you to go to cage number 1157, take out the kitten & put her in your pocket, walk out the side gate, and have a nice weekend, never mentioning this to anyone.”

I did just what he asked with tears in my eyes, a lump in my throat and a warm fuzzy in my heart, because I knew exactly what this meant - what he did to make this happen. Because they do euthanasia's, every animal is meticulously tracked, especially those that get euthanized. They are tagged and logged with full descriptions then placed into barrels which are kept in a freezer. So this meant first that he dug through barrels of dead cats in a freezer to find one that matched her description, and recreated it's death to take the place of the missing kitten I took home.

This is my beautiful Butter
She is incredibly special and not just because of this story. She's very intelligent and doesn't have a mean little hair on her body. She IS PURE LOVE. It took me many years to fully gain her trust, but I have it all completely now and she's the most beautiful, most tender and loving creature I've ever known, and it brings me to tears to think that this wonderful Love that she is almost never had a chance to exist in it's fullest expression. She's always by my side when I'm at home and she watches me with a look of love in her eyes. Also if I stub a toe or see a bug or anything that causes me make an exasperated noise, she comes running to me, paw outstretched, demonstrating genuine concern for my safety and well being. She's truly amazing!

So how did I come up with the name “Butter”? While she is quite the little butterball, I actually came up with it from a song that was persistently in my head when I first brought her home. It was from a Parkay commercial that kept repeating the word butter in different tones. I sing it to her all the time and she loves it.

And now... Meet Paisley, the Kat, Our new addition

Paisley is our new kitty. We brought her home at 6 weeks of age & she's extremely loveable, sweet and energetic. She has this long shoestring that she adopted when she was a kitten & she's been dragging it around the house ever since. We've since tied a little toy to the end of it that we found in our new place when we moved in & she loves it. She's also adopted my 2 pairs of pink, fuzzy socks. She nuggles in them - she'll suckle on it while kneading her paws in it. So we also see fuzzy pink socks all over the house. We also find either her black string, pink fuzzy socks or a number of other toys in her food dish all the time. I guess she'll be playing and then think she wants a bite to eat so she carries her toys over to the dish, drops it in & nibbles a bit before moving along to something new. Silly kitty.

Our new Paisley kitten

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“Never wear anything that panics the cat.”

P.J. O'Rourke