This is definitely one of the stranger ways I have ever gotten a pet.

Most of the time, when someone wants a cat they will do one of a few things. They will adopt one from a rescue or pet store, or see if they know someone who has kittens. Some people will go all out and look up what breed they want, find the perfect one online, travel to get it, pay a lot of money for it and its registrations and shots and all that jazz. But, if you have read my Intro to Chickens post from a couple weeks ago, you will know that things don’t work the same here.

Ezra and I have never had a cat, mostly because I am allergic to them. We have had mice, fish, bunnies and a dog and our parents used to have cats before we were born. We read that cats will eat spiders and other bugs as well as small snakes and lizards so we went to a few pet stores to see where we could get one.

Apparently pet stores here don’t have cats.
Eventually we asked if one of the stores could get us a kitten and they were like, “Oh yeah, we know a guy who has cats, we’ll talk to him and see if he can give you a kitten, we’ll get him to call you at the end of the week.” The end of the week came and went so we decided that we should probably find somewhere else to get our kitten. We happened to be at our neighbour’s house for dinner last Sunday and we asked him if he knew a guy with kittens. He said he wasn’t sure but he would ask around and see what he could do.

Exactly one week later we were having lunch on the deck with the guy who created the Permacube (a really awesome self-sustainability project) and his family, when Rigo, the above mentioned neighbour, drove up on his quad with a cardboard box. He handed us a kitten, told us it was an eight week old male, we thanked him and he left. Apparently this is how we do things here.

We talked to Rigo again today and he said that the kitten had been the only cat in a poor family, he wasn’t eating well and is a little too skinny but that is easy to fix. He has been with us for less that twenty-four hours as of the time I am writing this, he is eating well and is super cute and snuggly. We spent a long time last night debating what we should call him, mostly using names from movies, shows and books. We thought of everything from Pantalaimon to Duke to Nemo to Wolowitz.

We finally came up with a name for him, meet Pippin:

And now we have a cat. We are going to give it a couple of days to get used to its new home and then we will let it wander around outside. Hopefully he will get along with the chickens.

Adios,
Hannah