It’s been four and a half years since Lefty took up residency–highly involuntary residency–in the catio.
At that time, I said “And if we thought MM was unhappy in the catio, Lefty took matters to previously unconsidered depths. He complained. He prowled around, shoving shelters out of his way, and generally created chaos. Nor, to be blunt, did he get along with MM. She wanted him in the catio even less than he wanted to be there.” And I also said “If he’s still relatively chill, we’ll see if we can persuade him to adopt an indoor lifestyle. It’ll be a long haul, and an awkward one … But it’s worth a try.”
And here we are. Much less awkward and certainly much less quicker than we expected, that scarred and scared bundle of teeth and claws has become an elegant, cultured panther-about-the-house.
Don’t let that solemn look fool you. He’s not pondering the whichness of what, he’s considering the best approach to extorting another chunk of fish from our dinner.
Koi Scribblings 
It’s always such a joy to watch a holy terror evolve into a suave fellow.
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Isn’t it just?
The joke here, of course, is that in the same post, I said “We’re not sure how long we’ll hold onto [MM], but we’ve given up any notion of civilizing her. Once we decide it’s sufficiently safe, we’ll let her loose.”
And yet, here she is, curling up on the bed with the objects of her affections, even with bipeds present.
The more time I spend with former ferals, the more I come to think that there are no (or very, very few) uncivilizable cats, just too many insufficiently patient hoomans.
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Exactly. Our Nickel was breeder raised but had escaped from her dumbass owner and reverted to the wild over the three winter months before I rescued her from a parking lot. It took 18 months of retraining for her to use the box and not hiss at everyone, but she is still with us, sweet and tractable after 11 years of happy marriage to our late orange tom and four as the widow Catmium-Ferguson.
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