On Friday, October 17th, I said goodbye to a very dear friend. Gabriel, or Gabe, a beautiful Siamese mix, was euthanized due to Feline Infectious Peritonitis. He had been the King of the Cats in my neighborhood since I moved here in 1993. I would see him stalking his territory and much to my dismay, marking his territory and spraying around my garage and French doors on the deck (he could see my indoor cats). We didn't become friends until a couple of years later when I started taking care of stray and feral cats in the neighborhood. I believed that he belonged to someone in the neighborhood because he wore a collar and a tag, but when I called to trace his tag number, I was told that it was given in a rabies clinic and that no information could be traced to that number. So I continued to win his trust, and as soon as I did, I scooped him up and took him to be neutered. He had fathered countless litters of kittens in the neighborhood (again, much to my dismay). He always seemed to mate with one feral cat who to this day, has been too smart to walk into my trap and make the trip to the vet's for spaying. As a result of mating with this feral cat, a lot of his kittens were wild. I tamed one litter of three, adopting all of them myself and bringing them into my house to live. He was always such a good father--he never harmed the kittens--he always seem to take over when the kittens were weaned and "abandoned" by their mom. I always saw him with the young cats in the neighborhood--it seemed that he enjoyed teaching them how to take care of themselves. He formed a bond with his daughter Bailey (who was born in 1995) that continued until his death.
Gabe would always visit me in the evenings. He would come and eat in the garage, and I would go out and sit with him and talk to him and pet him. He always seemed to be very interested in our conversation, and I grew to love him very much. I doctored his fight wounds, which continued even after he was neutered. He seemed to know that I loved him (and all cats) and that my home was a safe place for the neighborhood strays and ferals.
I didn't see Gabe every night, so when I did, I always went out to talk to him. Imagine my surprise last Monday when I went out to see him and found him in the most pitiful condition--his fur was scruffy, he was sick after eating, and worst of all, his abdomen looked as if he had swallowed a basketball. The sinking feeling in my stomach told me that it was FIP, but I wanted desperately to be wrong. After a little door to door research, I was able to locate his family a block away from my home. I related what I thought was his condition to his family, and they took him to my veterinarian's office. The FIP diagnosis was made, and his family elected to have him euthanized Friday the 17th.
It turns out that his family called him Nosey. They had raised him from a kitten and he was six years old. He was very much loved by his family, and they had no idea that he had a home away from home just one block away. My father buried him in my backyard--it's almost halfway between my house and his family's home. Tonight, as I hug his children (Zoey, Jackson, and Ian, who looks just like him), I'm missing a very special friend. As the ferals and strays make their way to my garage for their nightly meal, their Cat King is gone, and the garage feels very empty indeed......
Diane Harris