What Everyone Should Know

In a 30 year study by the Price Pottenger Foundation, it was discovered that cats who were not able to eat a high protien diet were unable to reproduce past three generations. The kittens born to cats without the high protien diet developed smaller skulls, alergies and many of them died.

I'm telling you this as a 20 year old cat fed Friskies my whole life. When my new people brought me home, I was about 6 pounds and rail thin. The vet said I had been starving, even though I had been fed Friskies every day. Over the 6 months in my new home my people changed my diet to what I have listed below.

If you have a cat... do not feed it food where one of the first five ingredients is Wheat, Potatoes, Rice, or any type of Grain! Cats are NOT dogs... we have to eat meat. We are never scavengers unelss we are starving.

Even if you have to order this food online, or go to a non commercial pet shop for your food, you are doing us a huge favor. You will help us avoid many of the complications that often occur in cats.

I Eat:

Great Life: Beef and Wild Salmon (raw food kibble) online or at private pet stores.
(One bag should last 7 months)
Fileda Canned Food: at Pet Food Express
Nature's Variety: (a dehydrated raw pellet)

I get all three of these, mixed into a meal, every evening.

Life and Death

The way I see it, we all go someday. Latley I've developed a bad sounding cough so my humans decided to take me to the vet. I kept telling them it was no big deal and I meowed the whole time I was in the car.

The vet asked how old I was, what I was eating and if I was tired. My human told him I was 20, super active, and ate a high-protien diet. The vet seemed surprised. "She eats well," he said.

Then I got an X-Ray. It turns out I have a thing between my shoulders, under my trechia. He said it could be a tomber and I could get a $500 ultrasound and further check up... but if it was cancer and I did kemo... that may kill me anyway.

I decided if I was still able to walk to my food dish, use the litter box and bounce around the house every day... I would stay around and let nature take its course.

On a sadder note, when I was at the vet, I saw another cat come in. It was a beautiful 20 year old black and white cat, who looked very tired and worn out. He had a large bump on his head, I later found out was a tomber. He told me his owners had brought him in for the last time and that he was ready to go.

We talked about where we had been in the Loma Prietta Earth Quake of 1989. We had both been kittens. He asked where I was from. I said my memorie was fuzzy, but that I was rescued as a kitten from a flea market in Santa Cruz. He had some blood on his furr and his eyes were runny as we talked. Finally he closed his eyes and waited for the vet to come.

I've never seen a cat at the end of it's life before and was relieved when I saw my humans after the X-Ray. The vet said some cats just let you know when they don't want to live any more, and that they need to be helped along. Others just go on their own.

When I was small there was a great old cat named Scoop that lived with us. She was a little slow at catching mice but she loved sitting in the sun and waiting for her food dish to be filled. Scoop was fifteen when I found her asleep in the garden, one sunny morning. She was curled up in a ball and her long furr was damp with dew. Scoop didn't wake up. She looked alive, but I knew she was gone.

I'd like to think that when cats die, we become ghosts; leapord like with skill and adjility, all the spunk we had as kittens, but also the ability to retain youthfullness. We bask in the sunlit nooks we frequented in our lifetimes and we chase sprites in our spare time. But more than anything, if we had humans in our lifetime, we watch them. We are not able to interfeer in any way, but we are there to look at them and maybe understand why it is they think so much of us.

My New Name is Dakota Hear Me Purr

My name is Dakota, meaning "a friend." You see pictures of me here, but keep in mind, my name is Dakota. "Precious" is my former name; the name given to me when I was but a kitten, plucked from a cardboard box at a flea merket. Precious is the name I was called for 19 years, as I lived outside, in the cold... catching mice and gophers. Precious is the name they called when it was time to eat my Friskies kibble, and when I curled up outside the front door, feeling the escaping warmpth from within. Precious is my slave name.

The Big Move

On January 28th, my 19 year old cat Precious (see below) made her transition from being an outdoor cat at my parent's house, to an indoor cat at my fiance and my apartment. At 9:30pm, my fiance and I drove the hour long drive to and from my parent's house, where precious had lived an outdoor life. On the ride home, Precious sat calmly in my lap, eying passing cars and trucks. Within the first day, Precious was used to the bedroom, the letterbox and being brushed. Within two days, Precious had explored and claimed the office, hallway and bathroom. It's been almost two weeks, and Precious has switched to a high protein diet and gained some much needed weight. She wears a collar, (which is new) and is not opposed to wearing a harness and leash. Having survived a bath, she will go to her first vet appointment this coming week.

I am amazed that she is still alive, considering the outdoor life she had lived. Most sources say outdoor cats only live to be 12-15 years old. Indoor cats may live a bit longer, but not much. Precious will be 20 soon and she is still kind, adjile and smart. It's a good feeling to know that she will retire in peace.

MacBook Camera = Camera Dolly

The YouTube Video above was made by my humans, who thought it would be funny to follow me with the MacBook Camera. Humans... Silly Humans.

Farewell Dakota

How Pets Affect Us
A Tribute to Dakota
1987 - 2007

Twenty years, it's been since I found her in the parking lot of a flea market in Santa Cruz. She was a small ball of stripped fur; the tinniest in the litter of clawing, mewing, begging kittens. She was the only one with a pumpkin patch on her head; the only one who did not wiggle to break free when I held her close. She purred.

Many of my childhood memories are foggy, like the grey haze that comes in the Aptos mornings, so thick you can forget almost anything. But Precious, my cat, I remember.

The purr lasted all the way home in the loud, clanking roar of a red Ford truck. All the way home as, nineteen years and six months ago, Adam and I drove her home to San Francisco where she was aloud to live in the comfort and warmth of our apartment. That purr which lingers even now, as I hold her shivering in my arms. She trembles.
The purr stops for only a moment as she gasps for air. I hold my breath but I do not want to set her on the floor. For days now, I have heard her coughing in the other room, her purr elevated from a soothing hum to a scraping strain. For days I have awoken and checked, every morning, to see if this is the day she would not wake up.

The doctor said it was a tumor under her trachea. It would slowly suffocate her. Eventually she would pass out and die.
But we all die. We all die someday. So why does this, this small ball this runt of the litter feel so alive, even in her death? Why can I sit here thinking she is still a young cat and that at any time she will leap from my arms and chase the little ball of cat nip in the other room.

But I wait and she does not leap. She looks up at me and then back at the floor. Her breathing is labored. The little stripes that line her stomach move in and out like tiny prison bars, much wider and slower than they had, even a week ago.

Not yet, I think. Not now. And yet I have already called the humane society. I have already learned where I could take her if "things go bad." $40 for her to be put down. $140 for a personal cremation. $50 for mass cremation.

Not yet, I think. You are still here. Your eyes do not weep to go to sleep. You still use the litter box and walk to the food dish. You still try to follow me into the next room and watch me. And I know that if you could, you would shadow me as a four legged ghost, watching and waiting for me to reach down and rub your tiny shoulders. You only know life. You only know now.

I've even thought about cloning you. Your genetics are strong and your DNA would serve other generations well and I would feel like some part of you lived on. But it wouldn't be the same. Like me.
I feel somehow that we both survived. That we both made it farther than anyone would have imagined.

I rescued you but I know you have rescued me and that no other cat would ever be like you. You are not a cat to me, but a friend. And I do not feel ready to say farewell to this friend. Not yet.

It's past midnight, almost morning now. The sun will be coming over the black horizon soon; a time wen she usually plays with her toys while running around the house.

But she will not play this morning. I know she will breathe easier if she lays on the floor under the bed, but she is still sitting in my arms, purring. She never sits this long with me.

I think about what it will be like to drive her to the humane society.
But she still feels alive and no matter what I know otherwise, I can not set her down.

My Workout

They've decided that if they treat me like a dog, that I will act like a dog. So... they held me and ruffled me throughout Jeprody. I put up with it. They held me and petted me. It was quite a workout. At the end, I fell asleep.

-Dakota

Greg the Bunny

My People have been watching a lot of Greg the Bunny lateley. Thought I'd share the link to the page:

Greg the Bunny

Daily Things To Do

After coming out of the litter box every morning, (actually, it's a Boda Dome box) I run out of the bathroom and attack the carpet. It's not that the carpet has ever done anything wrong to me, I just like the way it feels between my claws.

A Cat Named Precious

It is safe to say that I was raised by a cat; at least from the time I was eight years old. I visited a flea market, and thre was a woman with a box of kittens, (a sight one rarely sees these days, and for good reason). From the box I selected the tiniest, sweetest patch-tabby cat to come home with me.