Greta is a foster cat. She is completely blind. She is a victim of animal hoarding. The brownish-yellow stains you see on her front legs are from years and years of living with urine soil on her coat. Her right eye is basically a shriveled raisin; her left eye is damaged and sightless so far as we can tell. These injuries are the result untreated viral infections, ulcerations or who knows what. Since she came to foster with us she has gained weight and cleaned up; her coat is soft and her eyes are no longer crusty (though there is always some discharge from them).
So what do you do with a blind foster cat? Well, I've been keeping her in her own kennel in the garage as I do initially with all fosters while their parasites die and their digestive systems adjust to the offered fare of the Ottocat household. So after all that necessary stuff happened there she'd sit, blind, in her quiet kennel, sitting, all blind and sitting there . . . .
So yeah, what do you do with a blind foster cat? I mean, she can't observe her environment while she sits there all day. I'm sure her hearing is fairly acute to make up for her loss of sight, but I don't know that the sounds audible from my garage provide a day's worth of entertainment for a blind cat. So I began bringing her inside in the evenings to sit on my lap while I sat at the computer. She is very loving and affectionate and enjoys our evening time together. This past weekend I decided it was time for her to explore on her own, with my supervision of course; the Ottocats, I knew, would not be beside themselves with joy to find some strange cat--which so far as they knew had just dropped out of the sky--walking around in their house. Greta, surprisingly, was likewise not fond of contact with them. Given the hoarding situation she'd lived in for who knows how many years one would assume that she'd be used to other cats. And that she may be, but the Ottocats aren't the cats that she's been used to I suppose, so she would hiss and swat at anyone that made contact with her. I'm sure that part of this behavior is stress-related--it can't be all fun and laughter learning to navigate a new house as the (sighted) resident cats run to or from you, depending on their level of fear or curiosity.
Greta spent most of the day Saturday in the house. In the mid afternoon I began to worry that perhaps she needed to potty and didn't know where the litter boxes are. Eventually she meandered over that way, so I lifted her front paws up and placed them on the lip of the box (which is actually one of those 18 gallon Rubbermaid totes you store your holiday decorations in during the off season). After touching her paws to the lip of the tote so she would know how tall it is, I lifted her into it and set her on the litter. She immediately did her business and then carefully if not skillfully jumped up to the lip of the tote and carefully eased herself back onto the floor.
I was thrilled with her success and expressed as much. My wife pointed out that I seemed "quite delighted" with our little, blind charge. "Well," I confessed, "I'm trying to make things easy for her while still letting her learn for herself. I've never been a cat and I've never been blind, so I'm kinda making this up as I go and hoping it works!"
Indeed: never been a cat, never been blind but nevertheless empathizing with this little, blind girl who is exploring her new lease on life which includes a clean home, a loving foster family, enough to eat and medical care. Most people wouldn't give a urine stained, blind cat a second thought. But, I'm not most people: I'm the Christian Cat Guy.
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