h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kadoefie the little cat died yesterday.

My sister bought Kadoefie for my father in 1995. My father was very sad because his previous cat, Floors, went missing. My sister finally thought he needed a new cat - even though we had another cat, Katix.

Kadoefie was a reddish-orange and white cat with black markings that looked like grease smears! When we got her home my father wanted to clean her up but when he inspected her closely, realised the 'grease smears' were actually her natural colour!

Kadoefie from the start was rather 'finicky'. She never much liked being picked up ... she would usually complain with a rather annoyed 'mew!' in her little voice. Her purring was also in a small voice ... you had to put your head close to her to hear it.

Her name, 'Kadoef', means 'thump-thump' in Afrikaans and refers to the thumping of her feet on the floor when she ran at her fastest ... something she was wont to do for no ascertainable reason. Just every now and then we would hear 'thump-thump-thump' as she's tearing down the hallway. She could be very silly some times.

But most of the time she was a prim and proper little cat, assuming an elegant pose no matter where she was or what she was doing.

In mid-1996 Kadoefie was still a small cat, when we decided to go to the Kruger National Park for a week's holiday. We had people take care of her ... but the very day we left, we looked at her and her behaviour and thought, 'Oh oh.'. There was a very nasty very big tomcat in the neighbourhood who occasionally intruded on our garden, and the way Kadoefie was carrying on that day, we were fearing something improper would happen ... and it did. When we came back from our holiday, Kadoefie was pregnant with the offspring of this monster tomcat.

There were three: an all black one, Felix; a white one with black spots here and there, Spook; and a black, white and grey one, Poplap. All of them became giants, more than double Kadoefie's size at adulthood. She, though, stopped growing about then.

Kadoefie never had a great relationship with her kids. She took great care of them when they were kittens, but when they were grown up she would frequently hiss and spit and claw at them. Her little front paws had exceptionally sharp claws.

Spook and Felix both died young, but Poplap is still around.

Kadoefie took some knocks in her life. She one day turned up here looking drunk and disoriented, foaming at the mouth ... we never figured exactly what happened; maybe she was poisoned ... my father thought she had been run over with a car. But nothing was broken and she recovered.

She never liked being picked up, but she did like being stroked. My nephew Christiaan got along well with her, he called her his 'little friend'. Even though she don't like children or strangers much, she let him approach and stroke and pet her. Later in her life, she became somewhat friendlier to strangers.

She sat with me a lot while I was watching television, or reading. One thing she did a lot, especially in her last years, was to jump into the bath and wait there until I walked past and saw her. Then I would put in the plug, turn on the tap to a trickle and then she would drink from the little puddle of water collecting in the bath. She occasionally sat in the wash basin as well, it was quite funny to go into the bathroom late at night to wash one's hands and then find the basin occupied by a cat!

She could go really crazy when we played with her with a bit of string at the end of a stick. Lightning quick darting this way and that, and looking extremely vicious with her ears pulled back and her eyes 'enlarged' somehow. She also loved playing with bags ... put a large-enough plastic bag on the floor near her, opened up a litte, and she would charge into it at high speed, sometimes attacking the bag from within, or using the bag as a 'secret' base from which to attack us or Poplap.

My dad loved his cat, but when he was really ill during the last months, couldn't tolerate her sitting on him any more, and chased her away a lot. I tried from my side to treat her a bit better.

Around when my dad died, Kadoefie stopped eating. At first I wasn't concerned since she still appeared very lively ... I thought maybe she had a bit of stomach trouble that would go away and she would eat better again. She had a bit of a delicate stomach, she tended to vomit a lot. But my mom became very concerned since Kadoefie kept on with this 'fast' of hers. She was tiny to begin with but now wasted away to almost nothing. I kept hoping she would improve, but she didn't. And last weekend, she started to really look sick ... it was a sudden and rapid deterioration, she looked 'out of it' ... weak, uncoordinated, scruffy and unkempt, which was totally unlike her. We took her to the vet on Sunday. I was shocked when we put her on the scale - she was 1.7 kg!!! Her normal weight was about 2.5 kg which is already small for a cat.

We took her to the vet yesterday. He determined she was suffering from kidney failure and had a huge growth in her right kidney as well. There was nothing he could do ... she would just keep on deteriorating, so we took the decision and he euthanised her. We took her home and buried her in the back yard, between a couple of my father's handkerchiefs.

We will miss this little cat immensely.

Here are photos of Kadoefie:

http://pets.webshots.com/album/577022341eKWWyt

She was a beautiful cat, and lucky to live to such a good age

What a lovely little cat. I know you'll miss her.

We've got one that gets into the sink all the time. She drinks from the faucet. She also drinks from the dog's water dish, just to annoy him. Those cats have their own water cooler, but hey...