I love my kitten.

[matt_doyle]

So I left a comment over on another blog about my cat, and then suddenly I just wanted to share it with everyone because they should all know how adorable and terrible my feline is.  So here it is:

Rusty has been ours for almost two years now. He was still very small when we got him, very kittenish, and his previous owner was a neighbor of ours who felt she could not care for him. She had announced her intention to simply release him and let him go feral, and my wife and I decided we couldn't let that happen, so we took him in. The owner told us, at the time, that he had his shots and his papers... and then, once we had him for a few days, told us this was not the case and she had never claimed otherwise. Regardless, he was (and is) boisterous, clumsy, and extremely affectionate, and we were glad to add him to our family. He grew like a weed (our current joke is that he is the model for the "longcat is long" meme), and we assumed this was a regularly scheduled growth spurt.

A year later, we met the woman who owned his mom, and found out that when we had gotten him, he was already more than a year old. He'd just been so malnourished that he hadn't grown or gone through cat-puberty until we took him in and started feeding him better.

In any case, he's a brilliant and devious animal (he's not polydactyl but he can open doors, he's very good at figuring out patterns and then deviating from them), and absolutely the slowest and most terrible hunter a feline could be. He's the only cat I've ever seen who has worse reflexes than I do, he mistimes jumps, often stops and sits down mid-pounce... my wife and I joke that we call him a bad cat not because he misbehaves but because he is simply bad at traditional feline pursuits.