Profile of a Cat: Moopy
My hope is that this will be the first in a series of posts which introduce my cats. At the moment we have 9 of the critters relying on us for food, shots and sometimes shelter.
This first cat, is actually the last one we acquired. Her name is Moopy, and she’s a mostly indoor cat. My daughter will tell you that she has a longer name, which is supposed to serve to give the cat some dignity. But this cat’s name is Moopy, though occasionally she gets called Moopita, or Moopilita.
Her “dignified” name, if I can remember it right, is Anna Maria Koshkoko Loca. Koshkoko being the Mayan word for coconut (I think), and Loca meaning crazy (female) in Spanish.
Moopy is my daughter’s cat. She came to us at about 3 months old. And when my husband found her, on our property, she had a broken hip. We have no idea how she busted her hip. But when we found her her back right leg was just hanging limply.
And she was also filthy. Here’s a pic taken right after we found her, before we cleaned her up and before her surgery, you can see that she couldn’t bend her busted leg:
The vet decided this cat needed a pin put in her hip. But for some reason, that I cannot now remember, the vet couldn’t actually do the surgery right away. So the poor kitty spent a number of days with her busted leg before she got the attention she needed.
As you can imagine this cat need a lot of taking care of. And my daughter did a great job of that. She kept the cat in her room for several months so she could recover without the stress of dealing with the other 8 cats. In the end the pin actually worked it’s way out on it’s own. It was creepy when it popped out. But we could tell the cat was fine by then and the vet was pleased with her healing.
Young beings can recover from anything. Within a couple of weeks of popping her pin out this cat was racing around the house, and is still far and away the fastest cat in the house.
Here’s a photo of a clean healthy Moopy making sure my clothes have enough cat hair on them:
Moopy suffers from a real desire to be an alpha cat, but, being the last one to come live with us she has no seniority at all. Poor girl. So she takes out her aggressions on us people, keeping us in line with gentle little bites and swats. Moopy often comes to hang out with me when I’m working. She will announce her presence by coming up behind me, reaching up and clawing at the edge of my chair-seat and having a good stretch. Then she will hang out just beyond my reach and talk, mrrow, mrrow. She always wants something. But I don’t always figure out what. If she talks too much I grab hold of her and force a little petting on her until she’s sure to be sick of it. After that she will usually shut up.
Moopy specializes in sleeping in weird positions, as evidenced here:
And I had many similarly strange photos to choose from. She’s a weird cat. And something about breaking her hip at a young age has made it so she does funny things with her pelvis and her legs when she sleeps. Still, she gets the award in this house for being the cutest cat.
She’s also the most intelligent cat we have. She will seek someone out to feed her when she’s hungry, while the other cats just sit by their bowls and whine. And Moopy works hard to open doors, fortunately she has so far not managed to actually open one, but this is a matter of time. And when it’s time each morning for me to wake up the monster-teenager that is my daughter Moopy takes charge and enters the my daughter’s room mrrping and meowing loudly.
On cue, Moopy has just come over to me and licked my hand. Now she’s lying just out of reach looking at me.
