Coulda Been a Contender

This is Ginger soaking up the attention after we got back from London.  This frisky kitty started her life as a barn cat in Upstate New York and is actually part Siamese.  Ginger has been keeping me company for nine years so far, including my last two years of college; longer than I've known Todd.  This picture captures her personality so well I had to do something with it.  This is the face and spunky attitude that I fell in love with when she was a tiny prickly wild kitten.  I was in college, I couldn't really have a cat, my parents already had two cats, she was practically feral, but I had to have her.  In addition to the pretty face and the spunk, she is polydactyl.  On Ginger this manifests as six toes on her front paws that make her look like she has boxing gloves or oven mitts.  She definitely uses them like the former: she is the boss of the dogs, no question.  She's allowed on the bed and they aren't so she lures them over to the edge of the bed and then rewards them with a double smack to the nose.  Or when the dogs come in from a walk she smells them all over and if they try to smell her back too enthusiastically she whacks them - always a double.  They always fall for it.  It's sort of bad for them because they don't expect other cats to have clawed paws and aren't as wary as they should be resulting in some pointy unpleasant surprises.  Ginger also sometimes decides that she should have some of the dog food and will help herself from their bowls while they patiently lie on the kitchen floor waiting. 

Now that I think about it all of our pets have polydactylism because Pyrs have double dew claws on their back paws.  Ginger's extra digit is sorta nestled in between her "thumb" and the rest of her digits.  Ginger uses her thumb just like other animals with opposable thumbs - "to flick rubber bands" - well actually to pick up hair ties and other things.  Ginger is our hair tie gnome because she likes to have people flick them so she can chase them down and retrieve them, but sometimes she drops them places where they are nearly impossible to get back.

More than the normal "on my terms" cat attention seeking MO, Ginger is peculiarly standoffish and sends mixed signals.  The longer I've had her the more friendly she has become.  She used to completely hide from strangers and even now with us she likes to have her ears and back scratched, but even if she is making love to your ankles that may not actually mean she wants to be picked up and despite not having any front claws, her teeth and back claws are quite pointy enough.  I think she's like this because she was a barn cat and had not actually spent any time indoors before she came to live with me.  When I was in college Ginger was a wild young cat and at some point I had to decide between having her destroy my room, including a gaping hole in the box-spring of my bed, and being able to keep her so I made the tough/touchy decision to have her declawed when I got her fixed.  The nice people at the Cornell vet school did a very good job and she's never seemed to have any problems without the claws.  However since she has no front claws I don't really like her to be outside.  Despite this, Ginger has had a number of extraordinary adventures that I worry have eaten up some of her nine lives, including a six week stint outside our house in NJ that I was really sure she was never coming back from.  Ginger has her own ideas about whether she should be able to be outside and will run the dogs over to get to the back yard.  We feel kind of bad because she obviously loves to be outside and seems to be able to take care of herself.  So we compromise and she can be outside if she stays in the yard and we are outside too. 

According to wikipedia polydactyl cats are good mousers and were prized as ships cats.   I'm not sure if it is the polydactylism or the wild beginnings, but Ginger is an amazing mouser.  When I came home from college my family wasn't really excited to have a third cat in the house and a wild cat at that.  But things changed when, even without claws, Ginger killed an enormous rat in the basement.  Cats are considered human-subsidized predators, which means that they kill even if they are not hungry and there are more predators than the prey population could actually support - this has been particularly devastating to song birds in many places.  We try to be conscientious and not let Ginger kill off the wildlife and except for one year when, despite our best efforts, she killed off a whole family of garter snakes mostly she just keeps us mouse free.  I don't think that she's ever brought a bird in, but the mice tend to turn up in weird places (like the dog's food bowl).  Occasionally the dogs thwart her mousing efforts.  Ginger likes to bring her prizes over to where we can see her and yowl loudly, then smack them around a little to show off.  Unfortunately this often attracts the dogs who blunder by and are big enough to provide cover for the poor critter to nip over to a nearby piece of furniture, then Ginger needs to recapture it.  Maybe she does it to torture her victims further...  Mice and garter snakes aren't her only victims, she is happy to attack blanket covered toes and fingers, using her thumbs to hold her prey in place and then alternately smack and bite them.  If you're not careful and don't take your role of escapee as seriously as Ginger takes her role as attacker she'll bite you no-holds-barred.  Ginger is also peculiar in that she likes to chase cars and trains.  When she is in the back yard she watches the trains intensely and then chases them from one side of the yard to the other.  And when I had her in college I used to drive home with Ginger and she loved to break out of her crate (she destroyed two) and then watch the cars whiz by racing from the back passenger window to the rear window. What a personality.