In many ways, Tiger is the true originator of the Cagaran feline family, even if he never had kittens of his own, and died years before we met our first Asian.

Choosing a home

 

In the winter of 2001 into 2002, a ginger tabby cat started visiting the garden of the student house that I (Heather) shared with my boyfriend, Richard, in Lancaster.  The cat would go from house to house, sitting on the windowsills and watching what was going on inside.  He would run away if approached, not as if afraid, more that he just didn’t want any contact.  Some enquiries among the neighbours led to the discovery that he’d been a stray since the previous summer, when his owners moved away and left him behind.

He continued to visit through the coldest months of that winter of winter, always watching, as if assessing the goings-on inside, but never allowing us to get close.  One day, in early spring, we got home from shopping at ASDA, and he was sitting on our front door-step.  We were laden with shopping bags, so couldn’t have stopped to stroke him even if we’d wanted to, but we fully expected him to run away as he always had in the past.  Instead, when we opened the door, he trotted in beside us and sat down in the middle of the front room.

We continued bringing in the shopping, assuming he’d make his way back outside, but when we finished he was still sitting there, as if he owned the place.  We held the door open, asking if he’d like to go back out, but he didn’t budge.  As soon as we closed the door he started rubbing against us, purring and generally wanting a fuss to be made of him.  I honestly believe that all those months of watching through windows had been him choosing the household he thought would best suit his preferences.  He didn’t like kids, didn’t like early mornings or fancy food or beds; he did like late nights, cheap ASDA ‘Tiger’ cat food, and having a pile of old dust sheets in a cardboard box as a bed.  We were perfect for him!

Settling in

 

We had some tins of cat food left over from feeding a hedgehog in the garden during the winter.  We offered him some of this and he tucked in, obviously starving.  We’d been doing some work on the house (as usual) and there was a dust sheet draped over one end of the sofa; when the cat finished eating he came back to the livingroom and jumped up on the dust sheet.  It was weeks before we managed to persuade him that we didn’t mind him sitting on the couch without there being a sheet or newspaper on it first.  He also took weeks to accept that he could sit on our laps without invitation.

 

When we were getting ready for bed, that first night, we weren’t sure whether to put him out or leave him in and risk a wee present in the morning.  In the end we put down a paint tray (for rollering walls), filled with some building sand we had left over from doing some job or other.  Next day we came down to find that he’d neatly used the sand-filled tray.  We took him to the vet at the bottom of the estate, and had him scanned for a microchip but nothing showed up.  The practice were sure they hadn’t seen him before but said that his condition suggested he’d been a stray for some time.  Initially we didn’t want to buy anything for him in case he disappeared, but he seemed reluctant even to go outside so we eventually concluded that he was staying and bought him his own food and water bowls, a catflap, and a collar.

As soon as we put the collar on him, he was happy to come and go, but he always remained nervous of being without one.  If he lost his collar outside, he’d rush back to the house and wouldn’t go outside without us until we’d put a new one on him.  I’m guessing that his previous owners took his collar off before throwing him out, and so he connected being homeless with being collar-less.  At that point we decided we’d better give him a name and, since he had a prowling walk like a big cat, we decided to call him after one of them.  Given his colouring, a Tiger seemed the obvious choice and so that became his name.

A special boy

Tiger became my ‘baby’ – he was very much my cat and would do absolutely anything for me.  He also always knew when I was coming home: he’d give the game away any time I tried to surprise Richard with an unannounced visit.  During the summer, for example, I’d go home to my ‘holiday job’ in Scotland, while Richard stayed in Lancaster doing agency work, and every so often I’d drive down, intending to surprise him.  It never worked, because about 15 minutes before I got back, Tiger would go out of the catflap in the back door and run around the block of houses to sit on the front windowledge.  Then, about 5 minutes before I arrived, he’d move from the windowledge to the roadside (our house was down a path, rather than facing directly onto the road), and I never got home without finding Tiger sitting by the kerb, waiting for me.  If Richard saw Tiger following that pattern of behaviour, he knew I was about to arrive and would have a pot of tea brewing by the time I walked through the door.

Tiger was also ridiculously intelligent, and had a phenomenal ability to know where we’d left things, or at least to find them.  Richard was always losing one set of keys or another, and would tell Tiger “fetch my car keys” or “find my house keys” and Tiger always came back with the correct set.  Some people say that cats are colour-blind but that’s definitely not true: all of our cats have been able to tell colours apart to some degree (when we used to feed them individually, they all had different coloured bowls and knew which one was which, even when they were fresh out of the dishwasher), but Tiger clearly had good colour vision.  Since we were cheap students, Tiger’s only combs were 39p flea combs from Wilkinsons, of which he had one red, one yellow, and one orange.  We used to ask him to fetch a particular colour and he never once came back with the wrong one.  If you asked him to find something that was too heavy or awkward for him to carry, he’d disappear off to find it, then come back and shout at you until you followed him to wherever the missing item was hiding.

He used to accompany me back to Scotland for the Christmas holidays, but my mum’s allergic to cats so we couldn’t have him wandering around the house.  I’d put my parents’ old fireguard across my bedroom door and leave the door open, so that he could talk to anyone working in the study, which was next to my room.  He’d sit at the door and chat away to anyone who would listen, driving my dad nuts when he was trying to concentrate on the computer! Tiger and I would take a walk around the local streets each morning and evening, him on his collar and lead (he wouldn’t entertain a harness), and then he’d go to the toilet in a corner of the garden before we went back into the house.  His litter tray was only ever used if I was late getting up to take him out.

The beginning of the end… or the start of everything else

From the start, Tiger had suffered from gingivitis (gum disease), and we used to have to take him to the vets for injections every 4-12 weeks.  He went in to have a tooth removed just before Christmas of 2004 and, when he was under anaesthetic, the vet discovered a small lump under his tongue.  She told us that it could be just scar tissue from an old injury, or it could be cancerous but when I asked if it could be removed just in case, she said there was no point doing such an operation if it wasn’t cancerous.  I then asked if there was a test they could do to find out and she said there was but it was too expensive; when I asked how much she just repeated “too expensive”.  I will forever wish that I’d pushed harder on that, because we found out later that it’d have been a few hundred pounds, which we’d have found a way to afford  I’ll always wonder if he’d have had years more with us if the vet had given me the chance to decide what was ‘too expensive’ for my cat’s care.  Anyway, we left with instructions to keep an eye on him and, if his mouth seemed to be causing him any problems, to bring him back in.

Even though we didn’t know for sure what was wrong, I hated the idea of being without a cat if it did turn out he had cancer, so Richard agreed that I could have another cat ‘just in case’.  At the time I used to volunteer at a local shelter and adopted a girl from there: a stunning but terrified 4-year-old whose owner had been taken into a nursing home.  We named her Jinny, and her information can be found on the ‘Former Neuters‘ page.

By early March, Tiger had started drooling slightly, which was nothing unusual due to his gingivitis.  We took him back to the vets and she checked his tongue and said that the lump had definitely grown and that she recommended having him operated on to see about trying to remove it.  I was doing a year’s industrial placement with BAE Systems, at the time, and arranged to take him in before work one day the following week.  I could hardly concentrate as I waited for the call from the surgeon to say how the operation had gone.

The surgeon rang part-way through the afternoon and told me that the lump had progressed a good way down Tiger’s throat, and that it couldn’t be removed without damaging the blood vessels that regulate temperature, which would leave him with no quality of life.  The surgeon advised that Tiger was still under anaesthetic, and asked if I wanted him just put to sleep then.  I said no, because I wanted a chance to say a proper goodbye.  I could hardly talk, far less work, and my boss took one look at me and sent me home to collect Tiger.  The vet said that Tiger should be fine for a while yet, but that we should watch out for any deterioration and, once he started losing condition or struggling to eat, we were to have him put to sleep.

The final decision

During April I went home for a few days and when I got back Tiger was there to greet me, looking slightly slimmer than usual, but nothing extreme.  However, Richard had bad news for me: it seemed that Tiger was putting on a brave face on my behalf and as soon as I left he appeared far from well.  He had slept most of the time I was away, and was obviously uncomfortable and reluctant to eat.  Over the next few days, a pattern emerged, with Tiger behaving as if he was fine whenever I was around, but then being obviously ill when I wasn’t.  My brave boy was pretending to be okay, for my benefit, even though he must have been starting to experience pain.

We knew then that the time had come to end things before he suffered too much.  We didn’t want to bury him in Lancaster, because we knew we’d be moving on from there in a year or so, when Uni finished.  My parents said we could bury him at the bottom of their garden, where my siblings and I had buried our rabbits and guinea-pigs as children.  I took the first Monday in May off work and we got an appointment with my parents’ local vet.  Richard carved a headstone to take up with us, and Jinny came too, so that I had a cat to cuddle on the way south!

Tiger was put to sleep on the 2nd of May 2005, and I think the only other time I’ve ever cried anywhere near that hard was when my favourite Grandpa died, in 2021.  When Tiger collapsed onto the vet’s table, in my arms, my legs nearly went from under me and I was so distraught they ushered me out the back door so that I wouldn’t upset their other clients!  I wanted to keep his collar as a reminder of him but, knowing how much he’d hated to be without one in life, we decided he couldn’t be without one in death, so we’d bought a new one for him to wear in his ‘coffin’ shoebox and kept the one he’d worn.  It’s incredible the silly things people do in grief.

Even though I’ve owned many cats since, and wouldn’t be without my extended feline family, I still miss Tiger: my ‘baby’, the one who started it all!  You can read what happened after that on the ‘Our Story‘ page.