Meet Viggo - Stray Cat Extra-Ordinaire!

Viggo the Magnificent

Hi there, good morning!

I've promised all you cat lovers some more tales about my cat Viggo.

So I'll tell you about how he came to be in our lives.  Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

We used to have another cat, an orange tom called Tigger. 

Tigger had a very important role in our household: he kept other cats (there are many!) from pooping in OUR garden and mice (there are many!) out of our house. Tigger was another stray (so is our dog. But no, I didn't pick out my husband from the pound), and a good, dependable but not very sociable cat. He had been abused as a kitten, so he always kept his distance when he was an adult. When he was 12, he sadly died from tongue cancer. And within a week, we had little mounds of poop in the flower beds and an entire extended family of field mice moved in from the woodpile to behind our wainscoting. 

What to do? Get another cat!

This took some doing, though. My daughter had set her sight on a Maine Coon (very popular, very expensive, very much in-bred). But we couldn't find one that we trusted to be reasonably healthy, and there were no stray MC's in the pound.

So I contacted our local Kids for Animals, whom I had interviewed for our local newspaper some years before. They remembered me, and yes, they did occasionally have cats that were brought in from the streets of Hellevoetsluis. And I was in luck! For they had got a family of four thrown over their fence just the week before! A mother and her three sons.

They were skinny and mangey, and very shy. And not very attractive. But if I would like to come round to take a look, they would be happy to receive me.

So we went to the Kids for Animals shelter, a building on an industrial estate not far from our house, and met the family. And no, they weren't very attractive. In fact, one of the kittens, the runt, wasn't just mangey, but he had an eye infection as well. But he was the one who immediately came up to us and climbed my leg. And started purring. And stole my heart.

We took him home. He was all ears, and according to my husband the ugliest cat he had ever seen. But he nestled in front of the fire, preferably on someone's lap in front of the fire. And he started eating.

We are now 4 years on, and he has never stopped eating. Eating, next to ruling the household, is his thing. He wakes me up in the middle of the night, demanding food. Demolishes newspapers, to tell me he wants food. Shreds entire cardboard boxes, to make us pay attention to the fact that his food bowl is empty.

But we haven't seen another mouse in the house. (Except for in my bed, but I've already told you that story).