Coincidence or What?

For many years I have heard people talk about being able to connect mentally with their animals. They say that it is possible to communicate with your cat or dog just by thinking thoughts and sending them out to the animal. I never dispelled that thought, just never gave it much credence on my part.

Then came a cat named Boots. Boots came into my life about 11 years ago as a 9-week-old feral kitten.

My brother lived in an apartment complex that had many feral cats and he took it upon himself to feed as many as he could and take those he could catch to get spayed or neutered. There was a female that he was fond of, that was very pregnant, so he made certain to feed her every day and she became friendly.

As her time for birthing approached he faced a dilemma, he had two house cats and did not want them around her as he did not know her medical history. In desperation he moved the cat into a hall closet and kept his cats segregated in other rooms of his apartment. She had three kittens, Boots being one of them.

Due to the circumstances that surrounded their birth, my brother did not have much time to spend socializing them and as a result Boots became a rare find when it comes to understanding cat behavior.

This cat is afraid of just about everything including his own shadow, but that is getting away from my topic of mentally communicating with a pet.

I adopted this bundle of nerves and he came to live with my husband and our other two male cats.

To begin with he was totally frightened of my husband and I slowly introduced the other cats to him. Our grandpa cat readily adopted him, but our other male saw someone that he could really torment; however grandpa Whisker's kept Isaac in line.

As Boots evolved into the household and began to find his favorite hiding places I began to notice something.

I had developed an overwhelming affection for him and his strange ways.

There was something about this cat you just had to love, my husband began to feel the same way (not because Boots ever came near him) it was just an aura about him that drew you to him.

Most of the time he was out of sight, but yet if I really wanted him in the house to feed him and I began to think about where to look to find him, he suddenly would appear before me.

As this began to happen many times I began to wonder, "why is this happening?"

Is he reading my mind or am I reading his?

Or it because he is hungry and knows it is feeding time/?

Sometimes I would try and do it just to see if it really was a thought process. On those times it did not work, so I chalked it off to coincidence the times it did work.

As the years went by (he is now 11) more and more of these coincidences happened and of course, I chalked them off as such.

Recently, we had a mouse problem (actually a fruit rat problem, but mouse sounds better) and this cat, that in all his years has caught one bluejay' began bringing in live mice.

He had suddenly taken up residence in our family room, which is an addition added to the back of our house (which is 82 years old.) There is a crawl space opening in that room that allows a person to get under the main house to repair pipes and things. We had the space boarded up (we thought.) It was situated behind the couch. The board somehow came loose and the outside critters were moving in. Mr. Boots had appointed himself as keeper of the room and in an effort to inform me of the problem, brought the critters to me in the dark of night to see.

When we had two live ones running loose in the house, I figured out we must have a problem somewhere and thought of the crawl space.
Now did I think of it all on my own or was Mr. Boots trying to tell me what was going on?

A quick move of the couch showed us the problem; we screwed the board shut and suddenly Boots quit staying in the family room.

We caught the two loose critters and thought life would be back to normal.

Wrong!

The cat that never hunted suddenly, began bringing me a new critter every night, thankfully these were deceased.

Why I wondered? Was it because I whooped and hollered every time he brought one in before and he thought I loved them? Or was it because he suddenly discovered a new vocation?

I did not enjoy these nighttime surprises as each gift was presented with a very strange howling meow that scared the wits out of us.

I became seriously concerned, as I did not want any more mice dead or alive in my bedroom.

As a result I resorted to deep thought as to how can I stop this behavior. In what I considered a total "lost in thought" moment I mentally asked Boots to stop bringing in any more mice.

A week has gone by and we have not had any more gifts of mice.

Is it a coincidence or what!

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