Fun fact: Persian cats may have originated in Persia (Iran), living in mountainous areas. Their signature long hair is natural, while their flat faces are the result of selective breeding.
It all started with a dramatic change in our kitty litter’s quality. The litter no longer “hid” the cats’ urine smell, not even for a day. The smell knocked us over! Also, we were concerned that one or several of our five cats had a bad bladder infection, so we were giving them all a homeopathic remedy for irritable bladders. No matter how much we tried to help the cats, though, the litter continued to admit a noxious odor.
Then the house rule was broken: urine was showing up, mysteriously, anonymously, on the floor beside the litter. We thought that the cats must hate the litter odor as much as we did, so they were protesting on the floor, or that the infection had advanced and the sick cat or cats were trying to show us the problem. We could not pinpoint the offender, though, so we were talking about purchasing a motion detector camera to catch them in the act.
We changed litter. We even bit the bullet and bought a more expensive brand. But it, too, almost immediately took on the disgusting overwhelming odor that consumed an entire room.
We had been doing just fine with our five cats despite the fact that they were on the older side. Miss Wings, a Shaded Silver Persian and her eleven-year-old triplets, Nymbus, Myster E., and Whyspurr, had never had urinary problems before. Even our newest rescue, a senior Himalayan named Mini Purrl, was doing fine.
The mystery remained unsolved, until one day, while I was quietly watching TV. Myster E. casually approached the TV, sat in front of the glass unit that houses the DVD player, and calmly peered into it like he was enjoying a TV show.
“How cute,” I thought. “He must see his mother hiding in there looking back out at him.” Because it was a hot day, I did not want her to get to hot sitting on the components, so I opened the glass doors to retrieve her from her now not-so-secret hiding place.
What happened next sent me screaming out of the room! As I peered, without my glasses, into the dark space I wondered why Miss Wings’ eyes were so small. Persians are known for their large eyes, and hers are huge. Then I looked at her nose. Persians’ faces and noses are much flatter than most cats. So, why was her face suddenly elongated like a Siamese? The moment was surreal, like when Little Red Riding Hood says to the wolf, “My what a long nose you have,” not realizing it was not her grandmother.
My brain came into focus! I was not looking at a little white cat. I was face-to-face with an unblinking, beady-eyed, white baby opossum, and he was staring back at me! I am not sure which of us was more scared!
Maybe it was me, because while the visitor remained snuggled on top of the DVD player, I ran from the room hollering for my husband. He thought I was nuts when I said (rather hysterically), “There is an opossum under the TV.” It takes a while for the brain to process that.
We cordoned off the living room with boxes, making a direct pathway out the front door. Then my hero “helped” the unwelcome houseguest flee our home.
Now the kitty litter smell was making sense! We had been blaming the litter’s quality and our innocent kitties! Apparently, the cats had not been breaking our much coveted house rule by tinkling on the floor. This hapless rodent had taken up residence here for several weeks and had been using the cat litter for most of the time.
The best we can surmise was the opossum was feasting on the fallen apples off the backyard tree, and because of his small size he was able to squeeze through the Cat Castle (outside enclosure) wire and enter our home through the cat door. Our five cats, thinking this poor new albino baby “thing”, with no fur on its long-skinny tail, was another one of our many fosters, gave him a royal welcome. They didn’t chase it, hunt it, or even meow at it. It was only by Myster E. sitting placidly and silently in front of the glass doors watching it that we were alerted to the “new friend.”
We had falsely blamed our cats, who were just doing their own kind of fostering, following our example. That night we served them their favorite homemade chicken stew. And we never had an “unusual” smell in the house again.
~Mary Ellen Angelscribe
