Tail # 5, Coco

  When I was in college I decided I needed a friend. I answered an advisement in the post about a four month old cat of questionable heritage. They had called her a Persian but it looked like mostly North America Heinz 57. You know a little of this and little of that. He looked it in the face but everything else was wrong, stripes on her flanks mostly. What I bought was a cat and not a show specimen.
 She was a tan to light brown with a black face and very fluffy. I paid the lady 10 bucks for her. Don't ask me why. After a few weeks with that crazy cat I almost took her back and demanded a refund.
  I had got her on a Monday and by Friday we were friends. Not a strong bond but just friends. I guess I had the Stockholm syndrome to thank for that. What choice did she have?
  I had enlisted my cousin’s help for the weekends. I was just out of high school and I need have the monster watched. My parents didn't like the idea of cat in their house. So much so my father built an enclosed in the back yard for cats. Note it wasn’t for the just a few hours, if someone brought a cat over the cat stayed in the enclosure.
  Coco hated the dogs at my parent house so I thought it best to leave her with my cousins. After a few weeks I asked my cousin what he had thought about my cat. He laughed and said he had no idea what to think about the cat. When I asked, “Why.” He explained that I always dropped he off before he got home and she vanished for the weekend. He was certain that she didn't get out. When I got there on Sunday she heard my voice and I took her away. It was like that for months.
  She seemed happy. Other than the fact she was crazy. She was very unforgiving for a cat; if you disappointed her she would get ever. My roommate caught her and his cat on the cat tower and sprayed them with flea spray. So she responded my peeing on his pillows on his bed.
  I wish I could have blamed his cat for it but it turned out that he caught her. She was one to hold a grudge and she started pulling tricks on my roommate. Rubbing up against his leg only to strike at him like a snake. Push things off the counter when he was trying to cook. Note she wouldn’t do anything to me. Until I started locking her in my room just so the man could get some rest from her.
  One weekend I went to pick her up and she was gone. I searched my cousins house for her and she never came out. Weeks later they opened the sliding glass door and she ran past then halfway scaring my cousin to death. She had held up in my cousins house and made a successful escape into my cousins backyard.
  They called and when I got there she was just skin and bones. I ended up giving her to my aunt who release her into her house and I am not sure if she ever saw her again.
  It is hard to take in animals that have bonded with someone else. They don’t understand that you are there to help them. In their little understanding of the world you are responsible for taking them away from their families. They don’t understand that their families had given up on them.  I have learned this over the 20 or so rescues in as many years.