First day of cats

We picked the kittens up from their owner, a co-worker who ended up with five kittens because he hadn’t had his cat spayed. His cat had had two tortoiseshell kittens, an orange one and two black ones. We were kind of hoping to get two different cats to tell them apart better, but as we were the last to “pick”, only the black ones were left. He told us they were females, so I came up with Furiosa and Ripley as their names, but when we picked them up at his house it was quite obvious that they were boys.

They were easy to put into their carrier (at 9 and a half weeks old, they both fit easily) and they were very well-behaved in the car. It was only a 10-15 minute drive, but they only meowed briefly in between and then settled down again.

We put their carrier onto the sofa in the room we had cleared for them and almost immediately, their little heads poked out inquisitively. Not much later, they found the way off the couch and explored everything on ground level. They particularly enjoyed running around in the storage box under the sofa. Eventually, though, they started climbing on stuff and honing their jumping skills.

We were looking for ways to differentiate the two, and luckily, one seems to have a dark brown patch on the left side. The other one has little tufts of hair on his ears. So for a while, we called them Brown and Tufty, until we decided to settle on the “proper” names Wrex and Garrus. Garrus is a pretty good climber and the first to get on the back of the couch and the desk, but as soon as he’s figured out how to do it, Wrex copies him and does it, too. On the other hand, Wrex is better at hunting. He catches his prey (a sort of fishing pole toy), then holds on to it and doesn’t let it go, whereas Garrus will get his, but then just kind of put a paw on it and wait for it to be pulled away again. Also, Wrex figured out very quickly how to get a little ball out of a box, whereas Garrus needed a bit longer to figure it out. Wrex also understood how the puzzle feeder works (it’s a little ball with a hole and some dry food in), whereas Garrus has yet to grasp the concept of “I need to push this ball in order to get the food out”. He realizes that food sometimes magically appears, but not how it’s related to the ball. You’ll get there, Garrus, I’m sure of it!

There was even a sweet moment when the two cats decided to go to sleep on the warm thing. Awww.