Category: Danï

my polydactyl cats

whbeebe

I’ve got six cats in my household, four of which are polydactyl. It’s an interesting coincidence that all the polydactyls came from Port Richie, Florida via The Runaways Animal Rescue over a span of two years. The only time before this that I’d ever seen any polydactyl cats was when my wife and I visited Key West near the Hemingway House.

Danï sleeping at night while sitting up. It’s not unusual for cats to sleep this way, but Danï does it far more than the others.

The cat with the mostest toes is little Danï. She is rather rare in that she’s got two extra toes on each fore paw and one extra on each hind paw.

As you can see when Danï decides to sprawl out in her sleep, she has some rather big fore paws, with two extra toes on each. So far all those extra toes on all my cats doesn’t seem to bother them at all. They run and play just fine, and unfortunately for the Florida lizards that make it into the screened in patio, they’re quite adept at capturing said lizards.

Nicholas

Nicholas, by way of comparison, has only one extra toe on each fore paw and normal (for a cat) hind paws. Nicholas has his wee head cradled in his fore paws as he sleeps, while he has his hind paws sticking out for me to photograph. The other two polydactyl cats are like Nicholas in how they express polydactylism.

I’ve wondered how the polydactyly trait is prevalent in Pasco County (which is north of Hillsborough and Tampa). I imagine that some cats came slowly north from Key West as “passengers” on boats. It’s interesting that two Gingers and two Dilute Torties are polydactyl, one male (Ginger) and three female (Ginger and Dilute Tortie). It’s an interesting mystery. Fortunately all of my cats are fixed, so there won’t be any more from them. All my cats are either rescues are the offspring of rescues.

easter caturday 2022

whbeebe2 Comments

Someone commented they hadn’t seen any Caturday posts recently (hello, Cheryl!), so here’s a post right before Easter 2022.

Luke has been my kitchen cat for, it now seems like, forever. I never had a kitchen cat before Luke volunteered for the position. Every morning he sits on the counter top or walks around the kitchen sink purring and asking for rubs. He’s there waiting for me to toast my bagels and spread cream cheese over them. When I’m done putting on the cream cheese I put the butter knife I used to spread the cream cheese on the edge of the kitchen sink for him to lick clean.

Luke and his brother Beau are both six-and-a-half years old (Luke points out he’s two hours older than Beau). They were the “bridge” cats between the first generation composed of Ellipse, Lulu, and Lucy. Luke and Beau came into the household after Lucy passed. Then Lulu left us, and finally Ellipse. For a time it was just Luke and Beau, then the clowder began to grow with the addition of Danï and Zoë, followed by their mom, Joan, and then finally by Nicholas. We went from three to two to four and finally six cats since 2015 (Ellipse and Lulu showed up Thanksgiving 2007 and then Lucy arrived the summer of 2008). Cat-wise it’s been an interesting time around the old homestead for 15 years.

Zoë loves to snuggle into blankets, and this one is her favorite. I keep it folded, but just about every day I’ll go back into the back bedroom and find her nestled in the blanket, napping or peeking out, like here. Rather than lift her out, I reach down and lightly scratch the top of her head between her ears. She loves that, and commences a purr I can hear across the room. All the cats are sweet, but she just seems to be the sweetest of the bunch. She and her sister are little girl cats.

Nicholas Joseph Purry is now nine months old. As the youngest he’s also the most rambunctious. Every time I hear a commotion in the clowder and check on it, there’s Nicholas in the middle. Nobody seems to get hurt, and the altercation quickly dissipates with everyone running off in every direction. He’s grown to be as big if not bigger than the two little girls, and they’re two years old now. I expect Nicholas to continue growing to a size to rival the two older boys.

All the photos were post-processed from raw in Lightroom on my 12″ iPad Pro. I know I wrote about how I wasn’t enamored of the iPad Pros I own, and I’m still in the same general camp on them. But this time, for this post, I found pulling the photos off the SDXC card using a Lightning-to-SDXC adapter with the iPad Pro allowed me to directly pull the images off the card into Lightroom, and then when I was done, to export the edited results as JPEGs to my iPad camera roll. From there I exported them to Flickr, which allowed me to link to them in this post. The whole post processing task turned out to be quick and easy, and Lightroom’s JPEG exports are much superior to Snapseed.

But back to the cats. The cats, along with our two dogs, are a continual joy. Yes, there are infrequent minor “moments,” but these are little creatures, and those moments always, quickly, pass. They love their persons and we love them all. How empty our lives, and our hearts, would be without them.