Jessica: The Beginning
It all started with Jessica.
My parents were living in São Paulo, it was 1989, my mom had just gotten pregnant with me, and my father found two few-days-old kittens alone on the sidewalk. He brought both home but one didn't survive, the other one was Jessica.
They didn't want to raise me in the capital so they moved to the countryside, and we went to live in a house my grandfather had. When I was born Jessica would sleep with me in my crib. She soon had babies of her own, and although my parents tried to keep them in a box in the closet, she would just move them back to my crib when they turned their backs because all the babies had to be together... from all the babies she raised in that crib, only one didn't leave, the big one, me.
Jessica and I had a huge connection, first thing I'd do when coming home from school was jump on her, and whenever I put my head next to her face she would lick me nonstop. I treated her as my second mother. My mom has a piece I wrote in second grade, we were supposed to write about our best friend and I did a comparison between my mom and
Jessica scoring them points, saying I could play with both of them, they'd watch cartoons with me, I cuddled with both of them, but in the end my mom won by one point because
Jessica couldn't cook, that was my mom's whole advantage over
Jessica lol
So Jessica had a friend, the second cat we got, I think she was also found by my father, her name was Maggie, and by then my parents had rented a small rural property and we started living there. I'm not very sure how it proceeded, but one day or another, my dad or my mother found abandoned kittens or abandoned puppies, or sick animals, and they started taking care of them, but all of these would stay outside of the house because that many pets would make a mess, only Jessica and Maggie had free passage to come and go.
Jessica understood her position and she never liked any of the "outside" pets, it was like she was a different breed, the blue-blooded royal, and she ruled with an iron fist. We didn't even need to close the doors because she wouldn't let any of the cats or the dogs come in. Hers was a reign of terror, and we called her The Queen of the House.
The first Christmas that I have memories of, Jessica was gifted a cat basket and she instantly loved it. It was her most treasured place and she kept that basket her whole life.
I don't remember what happened to Maggie, but she didn't make it to the small farm my parents bought next, and since then Jessica was only with us and never made any new friends, remaining the only house cat.
Some years later we moved to my other grandfather's farm, it was the early 2000s and we got a digital camera and I remember taking such beautiful pictures of Jessica in the garden among the flowers, but all the pictures from that time were lost in dead HDDs and memory cards. The newest picture I have of her is from 2001.
Jessica lived for 20 years, and as we were about to move from my grandfather's farm and we didn't want to leave her there on that land (where a lot of bad things had happened). We performed a homemade cremation placing her body in the basket she had for over 15 years (I don't recommend trying it, it took A LOT of fuel to do it) and we placed her ashes in a small handcrafted box a cousin of mine had made. Now
Jessica has her own altar, guarded by Saint Francis.
From Farm to Farm
So after Jessica and Maggie, my parents rented this small rural property that had a lot of space and no nagging relatives. One day or another they'd find abandoned kittens or puppies, or injured or sick animals, and they would take them home to take care of them - this also included a horse and a cow. We were never ones to actively go looking for animals to rescue, we don't even accept animals other people offer ("Oh, my cat just had kittens/my dog just had puppies, do you want one?", nope), we just never could turn our backs on animals needing help... soon people discovered that and they started just dropping unwanted pets at our door, and out of nowhere we had like 40 cats and 20 dogs - I'm not sure about the numbers. This small farm was our first one, the Chácara do Noragi.
Next we bought our own small farm and obviously we took all our pets with us. This place was farther from the city so we didn't have the problem of people dropping unwanted animals there, but we would still save the ones we'd find in need. On that farm our population started to lower, dogs are easier to bond and they get really close to us, but cats tend to divide into groups and be territorial, and that place had a lot of small farms, small forests, rivers, so often some cat would just leave us... or perhaps we thought they were leaving but they were caught by snakes or dogs on other properties, I don't know, we had a few dogs that died from snake bites and toad poison too. This was the second farm we lived in, the Chácara Alquimia.
During all this time we heavily relied on municipal campaigns of vaccination and neutering, our economic situation was ok but not very good, and my mother worked a lot. In 2001 my grandfather, who had a big production farm some 250km away, asked my mother to move there and manage the farm for him. We had no means of taking all our pets with us nor could we have them there because it wasn't our house. One of the guys who worked on our farm remained there and we made a deal for him to take care of them, our pet population wasn't that high at the time, and we moved to this new farm taking only Jessica with us.
By the next year my grandfather would rarely show up at the farm, and now and then we'd find a cat or dog we'd let live outside the house, but it was like two or three cats and one dog tops, and they would often go away after some time. My grandfather died in 2005 and then we had more freedom to run the house, which meant an increasing population of pets lol - a few were even approved by Jessica to come inside, like Smellda, Máximo Poder and Lúcifer.
Jessica died in 2009 and now there was no one to guard our door, so the other pets we had started coming inside, including the dogs who were never allowed before (they'd still sleep outside, but at night when we were watching TV or something they'd be with us in the living room). This was the last farm we lived on, the Fazenda Bom Jesus.
The Big Move
In 2011 the farm situation was resolved within the family and we sold the property, my mom decided to move to a city she used to visit when she was a kid, some 370km away, but this time we weren't leaving our pets behind!
I don't remember our numbers exactly, but I believe we had something like 18 cats and 5 dogs. First thing was finding transportation, and my sister-in-law had an uncle who had a VW Bus and said he would do the trip for us (but he lived some 320km away, at least only 160km from our destination). Now we needed pet carriers, we weren't going to buy that many just for one trip, so we started calling every pet shop in his city to find someone who would rent them, but none would, we only found stores in São Paulo that did it, and the guy had to pick them up there for us, which he agreed to without a problem (100km away from him).
The moving day was wild, we basically packed up the whole house (I mean, I removed all the old hard wooden farm doors, shutters, frames, closet doors and drawers, the house was going to be demolished anyway), and after loading the truck we gave the pets medication to get them drowsy so the trip wouldn't be so stressful and off we went.
Moving all those pets was quite a challenge, but kudos to that uncle who did all that traveling and didn't charge us a dime! (one day he went to São Paulo and back to pick up the carriers, so some 200km, the next day he went to our farm some 320km away, then to our new city some 370km away, then went back to his city 160km away, and the next day he went to São Paulo and back again to return the carriers, so another 200km, so he drove like 1300km for us for free because he was a Buddhist and liked animals).
The Barbarian Invasion Pt. 1
In this new city first we lived in two rented houses (with a good backyard) before moving to our own place, and in those two we didn't have many means of keeping the cats inside, we'd just keep them locked in for a week or two so they'd get used to the house and understand this is where they live now, but some still went away... we were in the city now, and we were near a highway, so there were whole new threats. The thing that stressed me the most was the thought of evil fucks who poison pets, those pieces of shit are not rare, so I was very dedicated to training our dogs, who had never lived with nearby neighbors or cars passing by before, and I didn't want them barking and bothering the neighborhood. Gladly my dogs were pretty easy to educate and we never had problems, in fact, in the three houses we have lived in here all our neighbors were surprised when they heard the number of pets we had because it was all so peaceful.
We got a few new pets here, we reached 10 dogs at one point, but the number of cats was staying between 10 and 15. Since the last farm I have become the main responsible for the pets, and I love them deeply but only I know how much I sacrifice of my personal life for their well-being. As I said, we were never ones to go out of our way to rescue pets, we only rescued those that were on our way. We can't take care of them all and we don't aspire to do that, there's only so much we can do and other people have to be responsible too.
It was early 2024 and our pet population was aging, we had only 12 cats and 2 dogs, the last time I had come across pets needing help was 2017, so the thought that perhaps by the end of the decade I would be "free" had crossed my mind (you know, at least having a manageable number that doesn't consume so much time and resources), and one day I went to a seamstress to get some pants hemmed and heard about a house nearby where a crazy old lady, who was a hoarder and kept several animals locked inside, had died, her daughter just locked the house and left, leaving all the cats and dogs inside, and they were there for three months with just a neighbor putting food through a window. I went there immediately, and the scene, I can't even describe it, they were all just skin and bones, literally living in shit, the smell was awful, you could barely breathe, and I only saw them through the window. I broke down, these animals were there locked and dying and nobody was doing a fucking thing. I know not everyone can or wants to take care of animals, but fucking kick down the doors and let them out and let them take their chances as strays instead of letting them slowly die locked in the dark. I fucking hate people!
I started calling everywhere I could, the police, environmental police, the prefecture, department of the environment, zoonosis control center... they all said they maybe would send someone to take a look when they had the time. The city kennel said they were full and they don't take cats. There was nothing anyone would do so I did the only thing I could, I took them all. There is this veterinary association that is subsidized by the municipality to offer lower prices but I needed transportation and they said they couldn't pick up the animals nor supply carriers, so I called a friend of mine who has a farm supply store and also a veterinary clinic, but I wanted to talk to his wife who has a pet grooming service and I knew she had a van and a lot of carriers and I told him what was going on and he told me to take the animals to his clinic that he would do the same price for me as the association. We needed to get those animals out of there as fast as possible but this was at the end of the afternoon and she said she was going there the next morning... I could barely sleep that night remembering the scene, the smell, and thinking about how they were... gosh, the smell...
The Barbarian Invasion Pt. 2
The next morning we were there, she took her sister who is a veterinarian to help, and I kicked down the doors to reach the small room where all the cats were being kept. I would open just a bit of the door and grab one and put it in a carrier. There were also three dogs, one locked in a different room, one locked in the bathroom and another one in a corridor. The last two are seniors, and from what I heard from the neighbors the one locked in the bathroom,
Matilda, had lived all her life in that small bathroom. All the neighbors knew about that sick shit going on and nobody ever did a thing. The one that was locked in the corridor was extremely aggressive. Only after we took them all to the clinic did we do a head count: 29 cats, 3 dogs.
At the clinic they were put immediately on antibiotics and IV fluids and then they started doing the tests. 32 hospitalizations and 32 blood tests for a start. As for me, I had to get my place ready for all of them, because I couldn't let them mix with my pets or my pets would get sick, I needed to quarantine them, and the only place I could that was a room where I kept old furniture, tools and random supplies. I got rid of it all to start working. The place had glass windows that didn't open and it would get too hot inside because I had to keep them locked in, so I just picked a hammer and removed the windows and put ventilation blocks with fly screens because the area outside had high grass and a lot of insects (and I cover with a thick transparent plastic during winter to block the cold wind but not the light). I also installed two cat doors in the door and made a division with wooden boarding so the place where they would eat and sleep was separate from the place where I put the litter boxes.
The first wave of Barbarians arriving.
Why did they need to be quarantined? First they were all full of fleas and mange, so add 32 anti-parasitic medications and 32 dewormers to the tab, they also had persistent giardiasis and mycoplasmosis which are highly contagious so add two weeks of antibiotics for 32 animals, but here was the main problem, if the cats had FIV or FeLV, well I have no idea what I was going to do, to condemn my old cats to get sick or to abandon the new ones... luckily it wasn't a choice I had to make, none had it and it was such a celebration at the clinic when all 29 tests came out negative - add 29 FIV/FeLV tests to the tab. Oh, you also have to add 32 baths because they were all literally covered in shit when we rescued them. Some of the cats were very weak, we were too late to rescue one and he died at the clinic, but some got a bit better after 10 days of hospitalization and were released to continue the treatment at home. Others spent another 5 days in IV therapy, but we couldn't take the dogs yet because we didn't have a place to quarantine them, they spent anoter month at the clinic.
So we had to continue treatment at home, my mom asked if we should buy a pet piller and I said nah, I've been giving pills to cats my whole life, I'm pretty good at it, sometimes one or another bites but that's ok, I'm tough, I can take it no problem... but now it was 27 cats, twice a day, for fucking 30 days, and on the first day alone my fingers were so chewed up that I bought a pet piller the next morning lol
I had to clean the 15 litterboxes I got twice a day, we had repeated the dewormers and gave them another five days of giardasis treatment but their diarrhea wasn't stopping so we did a test picking three random samples and we discovered they also had two types of fungus so we had to give them antifungal medication and probiotics - it was actually just the probiotics that required 30 days, and I gave it with a syringe.
The dogs came back and dogs are so easy to adapt, they became friends with the other dogs instantly. However, that one that was extremely aggressive remained extremely aggressive. He would try to attack us on sight, and surely was a risk to other animals. The clinic owner has a kennel and we had to leave him there.
Oh, and to complete the quarantine, add the vaccines to the tab. This whole deal? It cost me about $30k but that's because I had discounts everywhere with everything, my friend ended up making way lower prices than the association, and I had a lot of time to pay, and without all the help I got it would have been over $60k for sure... but this $30k was just the clinic bill, adding all the other costs it was probably around $40k, and I still have the dog boarding I pay monthly.
The Barbarian Invasion Pt. 3
This article has been pretty long so far but that's not the end, the cat quarantine was over, what to do now? How to adapt those cats with our cats? Cats can be quite sensitive, and if we were to let them come inside the house, well, first thing it would be a mess, but most importantly it would displace our senior cats, so we decided the new group had to live outside, after all, I even built a place for them, and with time I was improving it, first I put some old drawers from the farm on the wall and made some places they could walk and climb, then I bought a kit from the internet with steps, boxes and even a rope bridge (they hate it, don't buy it), but even though all those cats would only stay outside, their presence heavily disturbed our old cats, so we dubbed this event The Barbarian Invasion.
Walking outside for the first time in their lives!
It mostly affected Doralice, who lived outside in the laundry area, most of the cats didn't want to live in the place I built for them downstairs, they wanted to stay close to us, so they started moving to the laundry, where the dogs also live. Doralice started staying in the garage so I built a place for her there with water and food because she didn't get along with the new cats, and guess what? They took that place too. Bel was disturbed at first but he quickly adapted, although there have been some fights until they managed their positions in the clowder. Whenever we were distracted some cats would get inside though, and some were so so insistent on wanting to be with us that we had to give in. Petite was the first to conquer us, and Bonnie and Dorminhoca enjoyed her spoils. Next we had to give in to Lupin, later Neblina, and the last one so far were Tutu and Jojo... oh, there is also Zezé!
So when the cats were quarantined they started to get healthier, and with that, heat. Most of them weren't neutered and most of them were females. Neutering females is too invasive and their health wasn't that good yet, so we decided to only neuter the males at that point, sending them in pairs.
One day as I was picking the cats to give the probiotics and I picked Zaza from a cardboard box I saw something black rolling and thought she had taken a shit inside the box, I looked again, and it was a kitten! She got pregnant and we didn't even notice, she didn't have any belly, it was just one kitten, this is extremely rare - I looked everywhere to see if she had given birth in different places or was moving them, I also had momma cats that had eaten dead kittens before, leaving only the head and the paws, so I also looked for remains, but found nothing, it was only Zezé - my mom said this kitten was Saint Francis' gift.
The funniest thing though, I did the math, Zezé was born EXACTLY 65 days after the last group of male cats were sent to be neutered, so most probably they did a quickie just before being sent away - it's now or never! lol
As Zaza was taking care of Zezé we let her live inside (we always let mommas take care of the babies inside), but when he was big enough we put them outside... however, when Zezé started being more independent from his mother and wanted to hang with us, we just let him in again.
We rescued 29 cats and 3 dogs. One dog we had to leave at the kennel, one cat died at the clinic, one had an accident here, there were two cats that the seamstress' sister had donated to the crazy old lady but claimed she didn't know she was crazy, and she asked to have those cats back - and I went to her house, she had a few cats she treated very well, so I let her have the two cats back, one cat has run away (the one that was probably the father lol), but also one was born.
The final count: +2 dogs, +25 cats.
... and at least +15 years or work.
Little Stories
• I don't like calling them My pets.
I like to think that they are like, their own people, living their own lives. I just look after them, and they live with me - and sometimes, on top of me. I'm more of a pet haver than a pet owner.
• My mom once rescued a monkey on our last farm. I wasn't living with her at the time, but the dogs were barking a lot, the type of barking when they are cornering some animal (we can tell). So she went out to look and found they had cornered and injured a capuchin monkey. She took a towel, dispersed the dogs, and talked to the scared monkey, saying she wasn't going to hurt him, she wanted to help him, and that she was going to pick him up and didn't want him to bite her. Then she embraced the monkey with the towel and took him inside. She called our vet and told him she had a monkey for him to look at. The guy was surprised and curious, and he took another vet with him, and they were both afraid of handling the monkey, thinking they would get bitten, so my mom handled the monkey for them to examine and hugged him like a baby while they gave the antibiotic shot. The wild monkey really understood he was being treated and behaved the whole time.
He was bitten by the dogs, but the injury wasn't serious, so my mom fed him and let him spend the night. Next morning she took him to the edge of the nearby forest, put him on the ground, and then started aggressively screaming, stomping the ground, and waving a stick to scare him and make him run away. This is called aversive conditioning. This wild animal might have thought that humans are cool, but that's not a good idea to have, humans are scum, and we knew for a fact there were hunters in the region, so it's better for him to be afraid of getting near humans.
• I once rescued a toucan. They are so beautiful!
We are living right next to a small creek, and from time to time we see toucans flying by. Once one fell in my backyard and was cornered by my dogs. I picked it up and took it outside for it to fly away. Its huge beak is really scary, it felt like it could rip my fingers off, or my nose, if it wanted.
• We occasionally took care of injured birds. We are against cages and we don't want to keep birds around anyway because of the number of cats, so we always released them once they were good. Once we also took care of a baby bat, and he lived with us for a few months. We would put him in a building next to our garage, where other bats would gather, but he would crawl back to our kitchen door. He would hang on my mom's shirt, and she would carry him around. Once she forgot he was in her shirt and went to the city. She was at the bank, and the teller said "Excuse me, lady, your brooch is moving", and my mom said "Oh, that's just my bat", and the teller started screaming lol
• One injured bird we took care of we named Cucurucu. We picked him up from the ground at a bar a few blocks from my house. We'd let bananas rot just so they would attract fruit flies for him to eat. He was very cool and liked to sit on our heads and shoulders. After a few weeks he was flying very well, and we tried to put him back near the bar where we found him, but he kept flying back to us - eventually he got distracted and we slipped away.
• Before moving to our current place, we lived in two different houses right in front of a river, and tons of capybaras would show up at our fence every day. Capybaras are very cool, but they are full of ticks!
• Once a big-ass white heron landed on my fence and I was just there admiring it. Then I noticed it was staring at my cats a little too much, and realized how easily it could swallow one of them, so I shooed it away and started being vigilant about big-ass birds coming to our house.
• In our current house there was a stray cat that would always show up at our door but never let us get close to it, so I started putting food outside. A lot of people walk their dogs here, and many don't even put them on leashes, so to prevent them from eating the cat food I made a wooden box and put it on the tree we have on the sidewalk. I even made steps to make it easier for the cat to get inside, and it did find the food because I saw it eat a few times. After some time, I stopped seeing the cat, but the food was still being eaten, so I kept putting cat food on the tree, this went on for months until one day I caught it: a fat-ass opossum saw me and tried to run away. We had been feeding this opossum for months thinking it was the cat.
• We had two tortoises in our second farm. They ran away!
• Once a tortoise showed up in our current house. It's near a creek but it's in the city, and we had no idea where it came from. I called animal control and asked what to do, they said tortoises walk long distances, and if I was near a creek I could just put it there and it would take care of itself. I just gave it some snacks (lettuce, tomatoes, bananas) and took it to the creek. A few years later the same tortoise showed up at my door again! (I know it was the same because it had a huge scar on one of the legs and I recognized it). This time I asked around the neighborhood and discovered it belonged to a family that lived in my block, but it had escaped and ran away (lol, we are not the only ones outran by tortoises). I even got their contact and sent them a picture, and they confirmed it was their tortoise, but this family was living some 2200 km away now. I couldn't keep the tortoise because my property is a sloped lot full of stairs. It was no wild animal and this wasn't its habitat, so I found someone nearby to take care of it, they had a huge backyard that already had a few chickens, geese, and peacocks, and they loved receiving the tortoise.
• Did you know that the Brazilian Wandering Spider is one of the most aggressive and venomous spiders in the world, and that if a man is bitten he can develop a thing called Priapism, which is a painful raging boner that won't go down for several hours and you need to go to a hospital so they can drain the blood from your boner with a needle? Also, did you know these spiders are EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE IN MY HOUSE!?
The farms I lived on didn't have as many spiders, scorpions, and snakes as the house I'm living in the city right now (although I'm the last house on the street, right next to a small forest). For years I thought about getting some chickens for pest control, but since the increase of the cat population after the Barbarian Invasion, the pests have not been such a big problem. The 9 years we lived in this house before that, though, I'd find Wandering Spiders inside our house every fucking week.
Wandering Spiders are very aggressive and they will try to pick a fight with you - yeah, they will run at you instead of from you, crazy little crackheads. But you know what, I guess I developed such an aura emanating such I-don't-give-a-fuck vibes that after some time they started being chill around me. I don't kill spiders (nor snakes or scorpions), I capture them and throw them outside (walled property). I mostly just put the plastic container right in front of them and say "Come on, get in," and they don't make a fuss.
• Other spiders I find often are Wolf Spiders, and their prevalence changes from time to time. In later years I've been finding mostly Wolf Spiders... my theory is that they fight for territory with Wandering Spiders, and as Wolf Spiders don't rely on venom they are better brawlers. Wolf Spiders aren't crackheads, they run and hide from you, but they aren't troublesome to capture.
• On a few occasions I found Tarantulas. In fact, I remember when we just moved I saw one climbing from the other side of the wall, and I thought it was someone's fingers trying to climb, but it was just a big-ass spider coming in. Tarantulas are chill as fuck, they are the coolest spiders.
• Encounters with scorpions are rare, I guess they aren't that good climbers to come in. I have only found some very small ones, but they are more dangerous than the spiders. One day I was sitting right here where I'm sitting now in the living room and felt something crawling up my calf. I lifted my jeans and saw a scorpion, but I just shook it away and then captured it. This was actually the most dangerous encounter I had with a dangerous animal (which wasn't all that dangerous really). I find spiders all the time but I never had any accident with any, my mom says it's Saint Francis' protection.
• I have found baby snakes quite a few times, they probably come in from below the garage door or the door I have in my backyard, and in the majority of cases when I find them the cats have already killed them. Once I found an all-red baby Coral snake, no rings, and those are apparently pretty rare, but sadly it was already dead. Other species I found here are Jararaca, Jararacuçu, and Urutu pit vipers, like the Coral, all pretty fucking dangerous! - but the ones I found alive I just captured with a broom and a dustpan and released them outside.
• One day, however, I noticed my cats all circling something outside, and I knew it was some animal that shouldn't be there, so I went to check and there, just a few meters from me, was a coiled adult Urutu Cruzeiro. You know that aura I just talked about? They say animals smell fear, and I don't let them smell that from me. I remember once a big-ass dog showed up on our farm, and as I was going to put food for my dogs I put a bowl for him too, then he growled at me and I instinctively instantly slapped his face and shouted "Shut up and eat!" and the dog put his head down and started eating. When I walked back inside I was like "WTF did I just do, that was some big-ass dog!", only then I noticed it could have gone really wrong for me lol... anyway, back to the big snake: nope, I called animal control to pick it up hahaha.
Next day I installed a hard bottom seal on my garage door. At least adult snakes can't come in now.
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About This Site
It has been awhile since I've been thinking about making a page for my pets, but given my number of pets I knew it would be no easy task and would require a lot of planning - I'm also struggling so much to translate silly expressions and adjectives into something idiomatic!
I have a lot of pictures of pets that are no longer with us, so I made the In Memoriam page, where I also mention the special ones I don't have pictures of - if I were to add every pet we ever took care of, there would be well over a hundred!
Believe it or not, I'm not one to take many pictures.
I have tons of pictures, but it's tons of pets over decades. There are days I take several pictures, years I don't take any. The number of pictures increased when I started having a cellphone with a camera in my pocket all the time (2019), but still I mostly took pictures of the ones that were always by my side (like Saibot and Dali †).
My first 30 years of pets were only occasionally recorded, but I will try to do better, and I hope you enjoy reading about all these cute little things we gave the best life we could :)
ps: Obviously all the ways we refer to them, such as plebs,
barbarians, upper class, lower class, etc, are inside jokes.
There are no classes, they are all our lovey-doveys.
Nomenclature
I hope you have read the postscript from the About.
• Queens and Kings are titles awarded to the cat with most presence in the ambient they live rule.
• The Inner Party and The Plebs division is a joke on 1984. In the book the ones outside of the government, but that enjoyed more freedom because of that, are actually called the proles. The plebs joke is that the cats living inside enjoy sofas and beds while the ones outside are on drawers, cardboard boxes, and old pillows and cushions.
• The Elder Council are the cats living in my mom's room. I take care of new kittens in my room because they need to have someone to run to when the older cats are hostile, and to avoid the new ones, the older tends to band on her room.
• The Boys' Club are the ones living in my room, we also call it the Testosterone Room. The name started because whenever I was going to sleep Dali †, Saibot and Will †would follow me. After that Fonfon joined the Club, then Clubber †and later Fire †, all boys.
In 2017 arrived Bel, Luke, Emma and Doralice - this angered Dali †, who left. Emma and Doralice were the first girls in the Boys' Club. Bel was banished, Doralice became savage, so for a few years Emma was the only girl. After the Barbarian Invasion, Bonnie and Petite joined my room, which made Luke very angry so he left. Later we were joined by Zezé... the Boys' Club is now 50% girls!
2026/02/20 update: Tutu has joined the Boy's Club, so boys are in majority again.
• The Independents are the cats living inside but that didn't feel like going to either room. Maybe they really don't care about sleeping with us, or maybe they just don't get along with some other cat that is already there, but all of them have a more loner disposition and like to stay far from each other.
• The Upper Class and The Lower Class are just a joke on where the outside pets are sleeping. Our house is on a sloped lot, and the place I made for the cats is downstairs, but some came to live in the laundry room and the garage upstairs.
• The Elders are the cats that came from the farm in The Big Move (December 2011).
• The Veterans are the other cats that are with us since our last move (2015).
• The Barbarians are the cats from the Barbarian Invasion, we gave it that name just because they were too many at once and they heavily changed our lives. We joke that our older cats are mad at these immigrants taking their place, but by now they are all very well adapted.
• Banished are the cats from inside that were kicked out because they were marking territory, it's mostly just Bel, who we still let come in to eat but we put him outside right after. Fonfon is half-banished, he spends the day outside and comes in to sleep. From time to time Luke is also half-banished, and Tutu was half-banished once too.
• Savages are mainly Doralice, who doesn't like other cats and neither us, it's not like she is feral or aggressive, she is just very anti-social and doesn't like being touched. When Fonfon was first banished he also went savage, but once we started letting him sleep inside he became more social. Minnie is extremely anti-social but only with us, she gets along pretty well with the other cats, so I call her just humanphobic - Zaza is also to a point, not as extreme as Minnie.
• The Raiders are the group of cats that are always by the door waiting for us to open so they can come in and eat the food from the inside - which is the same from the outside, but it tastes better because it's on the inside. Bel has always been a raider, but now he was joined by Zack, Brad and Shake. They all try to stay inside after eating, hoping we forget they are here. Neblina and Jojo are former raiders, they now live inside.
Jessica: The Beginning
