In cat society, it must be perfectly acceptable to loudly wake up another cat and insist that it play with you because that's what Jack did to us every morning. Sometimes it was 4am, sometimes 6am, sometimes it was when one of us would accidentally cough and remind him of our presence and our desire to be tortured. While Jack seemed utterly content being the king of the castle, we thought he would like a friend. We certainly wanted him to have someone else to pester. So we got Newton.
Newton and Jack had a rough start--lots of hissing, hiding, scratching, and sulking--but they were licking each others' butts by the end of the first week, so we thought everything was gonna work out just fine.
Well, we were wrong. Jack picked on Newton incessantly. He hunted him. He hissed and shooed Newton away from the communal food bowl if he didn't think it was Newton's turn to eat. Newton's only reprieve came when he hid inside the huddle of laundry baskets in the living room.
We thought Newton deserved a better life (he was becoming skittish and jumpy), so we sent him to live with the crazy cat lady. Otherwise known as the little old lady from Pasadena. Or Grandma.
Now Newton lives with Nathan's mom and her cat, Silver. He and Silver have a playful, yet equitable relationship, and we can visit whenever we want.
If anything, our two-cat experiment showed us that Jack is not a cat cat, but a people cat, and that suits us just fine.
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