Why is your cat all trussed-up like that?
It's a harness we make him wear, when he goes outside. It has a tag on it that identifies him. His
“sister”, Allie, has a similar harness, with a similar tag, though hers is pink, and much more dainty.
Buddy is a former stray, having lived as such around my apartment complex for several years before, in early 2022, he decided he was my wife's and my cat. The story that has come out about him is that apparently he formerly belonged to some woman who decided she didn't want him any more, and just kicked him out of her home, apparently some time around 2016 or so. Another woman who works here, and on top of her official duties, takes care of the stray cat population, says that this cat's former owner claimed to have taken him to a shelter, but that was very obviously a lie. He started hanging out with my wife and me in our apartment in April of 2022, and within a month or two, he was staying with us pretty much full time. At the end of March 2023, we made it official; got him chipped and registered to us.
Until recently, he insisted on being allowed out every day, usually being gone for a few hours before he returns. My wife and I assume that he has other friends among the other residents of this complex, and that he would visit them when he is out. His tag has a TINYURL on it, leading to a Facebook group that I set up hoping to get in touch with his other friends. Of a dozen people who have joined this group, only two or three are locals. I guess he's attracted something of a small following online, from non-locals.
Allie, we got from a shelter, when she was said to be thirteen months old. Her story, is that she had been adopted out of that shelter a year before, as a kitten, by a family that a year later found themselves in a situation where they could not keep her, so they returned her to the same shelter, where we got her, over Thanksgiving weekend of 2011, just a few days after her predecessor passed away. We also make Allie wear her harness when she goes out, but she doesn't often want out, and when she does go out, she rarely stays out very long or goes very far. Unlike Buddy, she has never known any other life than as a pampered housecat.
en.wikipedia.org
