You may remember, or perhaps you don't, that we adopted a kitten from the Humane Society in December. It's been a rocky road with the cat. Husband and I had cats growing up and before we had kids we had three cats (the last one died when Brother was 4) so we felt that we could handle this experience... clearly we were wrong.
From almost day one the interaction between the cat and Sister was problematic. She was overbearing and he was agitated. Sometimes I thought he was just overly playful when he would bite at us, but other times I thought of him as an attack cat. Most recently he would lie in wait for her to run by and then attach himself to her leg and bite her knees. Another time, when she was upset and laying on the floor crying he attacked her head, she yelled "no" and pushed him back which made him very aggressive and he bit her shoulder and it left a mark on her skin through her shirt. Last night they were interacting and I asked her to leave him alone (I must say "leave the cat alone" 2,000 times a day) of course she did not leave him alone and minutes later she was in my room with the door closed stifling cries of pain as the cat attacked her and she was pinned down under the foot of the bed. I got very upset and yelled at her and at the cat as I stripped her clothes off to see the damage to her arms and legs and then I lectured her continually as I bathed her and washed all of the scratches. I asked her to please help us teach the cat how to behave....I thought I got through to her...
In the evening, after the kids goes to bed, he is usually nice, but he has had his bad moments with all of us - he's come to lay on my lap and then bit my arm when I pet him! However, when I got up early today to go to work I was optimistic that she would wake up and be reasonable with the cat. A couple hours into my day Husband wrote me a text and said he was taking the cat back to the Humane Society today. It turns out that Sister woke up and immediately started playing with the cat (she doesn't do anything to hurt him, but she does like to pick him up, pet him and generally interact with him continuously when he wants to be left alone). When the cat started biting at her Husband put him in his litter/time-out area and locked the kitty door so that Sister would leave him alone for a while...a few minutes later Husband had to rescue sister - she had sneaked over and let the cat out and the cat had her pinned against a wall and was biting her legs!
While I am focusing on the terrible interaction between Sister and kitty - It was not all her fault. This was a cat that never ran away or backed down from anything. He never hid. He was very sure of himself. If he wanted to lay somewhere and didn't want to be touched and one of the kids went to pet him he would bite at them and stay where he was. We tried different tactics to try to teach him not to bite, we blew in his face, we told him "NO" we gave him time-outs....but on the whole the number of biting incidents kept going up and he was especially aggressive with Sister. When I talked to Brother over the past week about getting rid of the cat Brother said, "but he barely ever bites me!" Brother has been the model of a compassionate cat owner - following every instruction we gave him and generally meeting the cat on his terms - but even then he has been bitten at a number of times.
So they took kitty back to the Humane Society today while I was at work. I feel like such a failure as a pet owner. I feel like I just gave my kids the worst possible experience as pet owners after lecturing them when we brought him home about how this cat was part of our family for the next 15-20 years....Brother was crying this morning as we explained (me over the phone) that we feared a continuing escalation of hostilities....He understands, but he is mad at us. Sister said it is ok that we took him back. It's just a sad situation and I never would have thought that this is how it would have gone.
Brother's acrostic poem
(at one point he asked me, "what is the word for 'figuratively drowning in sadness'?"):
Sad
Terrible
Ornrey
Raincloud
Miserable
Ending
Yelling
We are not going to have a pet for a while.
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