Horse
Heads up: This one deals with animal life and death. It also deals with the nature of domestic cats and, while I now understand (and largely agree with) the argument that cats are predators, not compatible with our natural ecosystem, this is the story of a companionship that started well before I was in touch with that sense of myself, so I’m just telling it as it was.
We had to let go of our lovely family cat this weekend.
I considered making this a meditation on something like the nature of death or the end of ambition, in my usual form.
But, I’m sad. So right now I just want to write about him.
If you’re looking for something about money or democracy or philosophy, you won’t find it in the newsletter today, but that stuff will be back once I get this out of my system.
The best guess for the birthday of Horse ‘Danger’ [Teapot] was Valentine’s Day 2005. We fell in love with him—an abandoned kitten, among many, in a little grey cage—as soon as we found him at the local SPCA. And he was as faithful a companion as any cat can be, for his near-19 year life with us.
We never really liked the commercialism that modern Valentine’s Day wrought, so we’d always celebrate ‘Horse’s Birthday’ instead on February 14.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, that middle name was a concession to my (now) wife, to me later pleading to use “Danger” as a middle name for any future human children we might have! I sort-of lost that battle, but it still remained a source of great pride for me whenever we got to log his name with vets and catteries over the years.
When we first got Horse, we lived on the edge of a large mangrove swamp where our previous cat, Molly, had regularly returned from (following unexplained ‘adventures’), coated in mud all the way up her legs and her belly. Like Horse, she was also a rescue, but was both a very “pretty” tabby cat and fiercely independent from the day we got her.
So, once we came to terms with her loss—one day she simply disappeared—we determined our next cat would be as different from her as possible, to avoid another heartbreak like that.
Horse was a tiny, cute and timid-looking, black and white kitten with a prominent white “saddle” on his back; male and (based optimistically on the way he behaved in his SPCA cage) not especially adventurous. Horse was to be the perfect Ying to Molly’s Yang.
Remarkably, it took a couple of weeks and the mention of our new family member in a phone call to my sister for someone to exclaim “oh, like Footrot Flats!” Incredibly (and somewhat embarrassingly, as good Kiwis) we had genuinely not consciously considered Footrot Flats at all when naming him Horse, despite actually being completely familiar with Murray Ball’s genius. At the time, it had been all about that ‘saddle’ which, ironically, then only continued to shrink in prominance as he grew into a cat anyway!
Our own Horse proved to be an appealing kick-ass right from day one. “Appealing” in the sense that, while we were sorting out the paperwork at the SPCA after choosing him, two other separate parties were also enquiring about taking him home. And kick-ass in the way he was clearly a fighter from the get-go.
The very first night we brought him home, he developed a persistent sneeze, breathing difficulty, and a fever, and the SPCA told us to bring him back. We were then told he had contracted severe cat flu and, given his young age and condition, we should prepare ourselves for him to “not make it”.
Obviously though, a few days later, he’d decided he wasn’t putting up with that shit, and had pulled himself together enough that we could bring him home.
I know all pet owners think they have the “best” pet, but Horse genuinely was an amazing combination of a totally independent creature who also just loved being with people. When we had our first daughter, he would sit happily beside her, purring support as she rolled around on her playmat; he would sit on any spare lap or find a spot in any room where we congregated, just to be around us. When my wife had rowdy bookclub evenings, or we had large gatherings for Christmas, friends, or colleagues, Horse would casually wander right into the middle of the mayhem and find a spot to happily sleep while it all carried on around him.
He would always join us when we worked out in the garden and, for a long time, he used to even try and join us for our walks around the neighbourhood… More on that in a bit.
Equally, we soon learned he would take no crap from other cats. When we moved to a street where several neighbours also owned cats, he quickly became known as “The Don” because of his reputation for proactively ‘managing’ his territory, as well as that of the other cats. From our house, slightly elevated at the top of the street, we’d see him casually stroll into the backdoors of neighbouring houses and help himself to their cat’s food, necessitating several apologetic conversations with the neighbours, and an assurance that we were fine for them to squirt water at him if they ever caught him pulling that cheeky nonsense.
I once saw him wander nonchalantly across “his” street, right in front of a bus. I was grateful to see the bus slowed, but Horse just paused, looked up at the driver for a long moment, then continued at his own measured pace across the rest of the street.
We tried twice to put him into different catteries when going away on holidays, and twice received calls to say he was a lovely cat, but he’d “bullied” the other cats in their shared cage, and was being relocated to a (premium-priced) solo cage… After that second attempt, we resorted to neighbours feeding him, or housesitters.
His preference was clear though. He was grumpy for days after we returned if we left him to be fed by neighbours. But no problems with housesitters. In fact, we hated to admit it, but always suspected some other family could replace us in the house one day, and he’d remain perfectly content so long as they kept feeding him and scratching him behind his ears.
Aside from bullying the neighbouring cats, he was very well-behaved. He would patiently sit on a spare chair at the diner table, to be with us while we ate, but knew to never try and get on tables or kitchen benches himself. A few years back, I built myself a (long-desired) outdoor pizza oven, and every time I lit it, he would wait nearby while I tended to it, hoping for any stray pizza cheese or sausage toppings, but only if they dropped to the ground.
I’m a little ashamed to admit he did get a handful of birds over the years, in spite of our attempts with collars and bells, but we like to think he made up for it in the form of many many more mice and rats—especially when we lived near the mangroves.
Once, I recall he carefully lined up mum, dad and three little mouse-kids at our back door over the course of an afternoon.
Considerately, he rarely brought his prey across the threshold into our actual house, but I received a call once from my wife (while overseas for work) to inform me he’d brought in a “huge and very alive” rat and was “playing with it in the kitchen!” Fortunately (for me), as we were trying to solve that problem, her young cousin—in training to be a vet nurse—stopped by to drop something off, and my wife decided she was qualified to deal with it, so I hung off. It wasn’t until later that I heard the cousin had seen the size and liveliness of the rat and said “Jesus, I’m not going near that”, and they both ended up having to wait for Horse to finish the rat off before they could dispose of it!
One thing that probably did temper his predatory behaviour a little was the fact he was exceptionally well fed, between the fancy Science Diet stuff we put out for him (on the explicit direction of a long-time veterinary friend) and, of course, whatever the various neighbours thought they were feeding their own cats!
Once he pushed the sneaking into one neighbour’s place too far though, and ended up locked in their house for most of a weekend when they shut up for a quick break away—not realising he was inside.
But the biggest dramas involved his rear right leg.
Around the edge of the mangrove swamp, there was a short public walking track, used mostly by locals. One afternoon while I was down-country (for work again!) my wife, 7.5 months pregnant with our first child, heard a commotion outside and rushed out to see a furtive man hustling a large, resisting, dog away down the path. She also heard a loud yowling coming from one of the bushes at the edge of our driveway and soon discovered Horse, in a pool of his own blood, had been savagely attacked by the unleashed dog. We never determined who the owner was, as he clearly had no intention of staying despite it being perfectly clear what had happened.
We subsequently heard several rumours about an irresponsible dog owner who lived a few streets away, and stories of his dog being allowed off leash, and attacking other dogs, cats, and even passing children.
Horse’s back leg was essentially shattered by the dog’s jaws, and my heavily-pregnant wife had to take him to an emergency vet then call me to discuss whether we should commit to the thousands of dollars required to repair it, or put him down.
You already know what we decided. So, let me just take this opportunity to say, on the obscenely-small chance that dog owner (who certainly would know who he is) reads my newsletter: “Fuck you. You remain one of the biggest cowards I’ve ever encountered. All I can hope for is Karma stopped by your place shortly afterwards, and something you let your irresponsibly-owned dog eat gave it such a stomach upset that it did explosive diarrhoea in every corner of your house… So much diarrhoea in fact that you had no choice but to recarpet your whole place. And, I hope, shortly before that, you’d banged your head so hard on a branch in your no-doubt overgrown backyard that you’d forgotten to renew your house insurance!”
Horse was to live in a literal cage in our living room for, from memory, five weeks. A pin was inserted through his leg to align the broken bone fragments, along with a cast to keep the whole thing straight.
To ensure proper healing conditions he then had to live, sleep, and eat in a roughly 1m² cage, including a litter box.
I’m told cats ‘acclimatise’ to their situations, but I doubt he really ever enjoyed that.
Still, despite being stuck in that tiny cage with a cast, he somehow managed to bend the ‘standard’ cat pin in his back leg. The vet proudly told us he would replace it with a pin designed for German Shepherd-sized dogs and an external bracket: “He won’t bend that!”
All said, by the time we had our first daughter, Horse was, far and away, the most expensive thing we had owned1. Early in my own career, and with both of us pretty committed to one stay-at-home parent until our kids started school, it was a ‘character building’ time for us.
Pet insurance in Aotearoa was mostly just a twinkle in some local financier’s eye at that point, so we certainly didn’t have that to fall back on. But we also already knew Horse was special, so we just scrimped and paid the vet according to the generously spread-out payments they allowed us.
Anyway, he came right. He was still relatively young at that point and healed up well, so was back doing all the jumping and running he loved again soon enough… At least, until about 10 years later, when he broke the same fucking leg again!
Yep. While living in an altogether different house, he managed to put us through the same process with the same leg!
We (meanly) joke with my wife that she must have stood on his leg and broken it, because we first discovered he was limping when he yelped as she lightly bumped him outside our front door. But we suspect he was hit by a car. Usually, his road sense (outside of staring down literal buses) was actually pretty developed2, but drivers would still sometimes tear up our hill, and it’s hard to avoid all idiots.
So, through it all again. No bent-pin drama (and two incomes) the second time, fortunately. But the vet made clear, even another minor break to that leg and it would “have to come off!”
Older Horse again made an impressive recovery. He was always strong: Even up until just a couple of week ago, we’d see him still carefully climbing fences and jumping up on chairs, despite being down to near half the body weight and muscle mass by that point.
It wasn’t his curiosity that got him, like some proverbial cats, it was kidney disease. But curiosity was still the source of some troubles.
As I alluded to earlier, his love of human company meant the younger Horse would often follow us and other walkers for some distance. He developed a cute habit of ‘hiding’ what he was doing by slipping in and out of backyards and into the silhouette of various cars, letterboxes, and bushes as we tried to shoo him back home.
We even tried a cat harness at one point, thinking we might be able to literally take him on walks with us. These, we discovered, are definite try-before-you-buy things because it turns out a large portion of cats, including Horse, are hilariously-incompatible with them and simply collapse into a mushy flop or creep around on their bellies like army recruits as soon as the harness is placed around them. So, that didn’t work.
We were aware of his tricks naturally, so could distract him with “lollies” (“Temptations” cat treats) or a maze of closed doors, when we were heading out for a walk. But it wasn’t so easy to stop him sneakily following other walkers.
So, we’d already misplaced him for a few hours on a couple of occasions. But after he disappeared for around 3 days we did start to worry. The ‘lost cat’ posters went up.
After two weeks without hearing much, we had essentially given up hope, especially when a neighbour mentioned she thought she’d seen him following some young boys on scooters “to the shops”.
The “shops” were just under 3km from our house.
I don’t know a lot about cats but, to me, a 3km exploratory radius seemed pretty big for a domestic cat.
At around the three-week mark, we were resolved to not getting him back so, to quench our own sorrow and celebrate his time with us, my wife and I decided to arrange a babysitter for our young children, and treat ourselves to an expensive dégustation at a restaurant we’d long hoped to get to: Borrowing from a future of assumed pet food cost savings.
And, as you've likely predicted, two days later we received a phone call in broken English, but clearly involving the words “cat”, “horse”, and an address roughly 5km away.
As the story slowly unfolded over the following days, it seems Horse had spent roughly two weeks at the local shopping area, apparently getting well looked after by the butcher. He'd then followed a newly-immigrant Korean family home—in the opposite direction of our house.
The net result was Horse managed to take in an impressive food tour in his middle age.
It turned out that both my wife vaguely knew the Korean family (from our daughters’ school), but also, Horse’s Science Diet-tuned gut was not accustomed to such riches. When my wife went to see if indeed this cat was our Horse, she literally didn’t recognise him at first in his bloated state.
Regardless, we decided, when we got him home, he should stay inside for a couple of days to get resettled. However, after his litter tray became the first victim of his 3 weeks of varied rich foods, we quickly determined that sort of thing was best reserved for the outdoors, and he was back in his old stomping ground!
His last couple of years were obviously slower. Beyond the age of about 15, most people assume cats sleep a lot. And that was largely true for Horse, although he still confidently ‘maintained’ his territory. We used to say he was living his “best life” in those years. He was living with older and slightly more respectful children around him, and had plenty of sleep spots scattered around the house to chase the sun into.
He did develop a thyroid condition, for which he ended up getting (expensive) radiation treatment—we were really regretting that lack of pet insurance by that point—but then his age really started to catch up with him.
The last time we took him to the vet, before the last time we took him to the vet, his kidney had clearly completely packed up. In spite of him being on special food and medicine, the results of the various tests and levels and urine sediment measurements were largely delivered in a haze to our family, with the vet’s most salient point being he was shocked Horse was still eating at all. In human terms, his levels were described as “ICU dialysis; awaiting urgent transplant”.
So, we know his time was limited, and spent the next few weeks crying a bit, talking about his life and, above all, enjoying his company. Horse, for his part, was no longer intersted in ‘healthy’ food, so lived on “lollies”, kangaroo and veal, and the various “creamy treats”, “broths” and “pâtés” that premium pet food now consist of—whatever we could find that he would actually eat and, if necessary, we could hide medication in.
He seemed equally conscious of spending his time with us, sleeping at the end of my daughters’ beds in turns, and sitting on my lap while I worked. I even had to set up an articulating laptop stand over my favourite seat so he could sit on me while I typed. Pet owners are ridiculous!
He was slow on the stairs, and loudly meowed when he became apparently confused, but he never had any accidents in the house, and still managed to leap up to his favourite spots, on windowsills and chairs, just to keep an eye on the neighbourhood.
When he did finally stop eating, and was barely drinking, we knew it was time to release him from our own yearning to keep him around. We had agreed, as a family, that we wouldn’t do anything until we could no longer honestly tell ourselves he was still “living his best life”.
And so Horse was gently put into his final sleep, with my wife and I by his side.
I woke up this morning not to his cries for breakfast, as I had for years, but to the realisation that Horse was part of near-half my lifetime of habits and companionship. Loss is, of course, part of the human experience and something we should embrace. But I’m still sitting on a chair and typing this where, just days ago, he sat with me. And that leaves a hole in me.
Horse was just a cat I know. We suffer far greater losses. But he grew up in parallel with our family, and he was wonderful. I love that I have so much to remember of him, and that he was lucky enough to be picked into a family that truly appreciated him.
Go well little buddy. Whereever you’ve ended up, I’m sure you already worked out where that last shaft of afternoon sunlight is going to land.
-T
Assuming it’s ever really possible to ‘own’ a cat!
Back when we got Horse, my wife had liked the idea of getting a “Ragdoll” cat. These are ridiculously expensive breed animals that we certainly couldn’t afford at the time (or now). They are apparently wonderful house pets, but our decision was strengthened by being told you shouldn’t own one if you live near a road because they are too “stupid” and will get run over.
Loved this. xx Empathised with so much of it, and dread the final moment. My cat Tija is 16. (Living in the country helps feline longevity. Very few - of many - previous cats have made it this long.) ...I'll read your other writing another time! When I've stopped blowing my nose. I expect I'll like it :)
Sorry for the loss of your fur baby, he sure sounds like a character