Zoe the Magnificent

Zoe is truly the cat with the loveliest nature. He’s very clever, and has all of us completely under his spell.

Zoe and his brother Mimsie were born in West Virginia, USA, some seven years ago. We were living in Washington DC at the time, and I wanted a cat, just one cat, so we went to a pet shelter and I saw the cat I wanted, a beautiful ginger. We were told we couldn’t have him without taking his brother Slush, which we eventually agreed to do.

A representative from the cat shelter came out to our home to check that we were worthy recipients of two young cats, and we must have passed muster, as we were able to take them home. The kids immediately changed Slush’s name to Zoe (even though he’s a male), and the cats soon became part of our family.

One night Zoe didn’t appear for dinner, and we couldn’t find him anywhere. We were devastated. The next day when the shower was on we heard a tiny meow. The frantic search began, until I realised that he was behind the wall I had made repairs to the day before. Yep, he’d decided to see what was behind the hole I’d made, and probably fell asleep while I was fixing it back up. We were very relieved to have him back with us.

Moving forward a couple of years and we decided to head home to Sydney. The cost for bringing the cats with us was more than $3,000. First of all they both needed a $500 rabies shot by a special vet, which had to be certified by the State Veterinarian in

Washington (and by the way, when we got their paperwork we discovered they weren’t brothers!!!), and then they had to travel to the US West Coast for an overnight stay, and then back to the airport for their flight to Sydney, and of course then they had to stay in Quarantine in Australia for what seemed like an eternity.

We moved into a townhouse in Sydney, and knew that keeping two cats was beyond the rules of our rental agreement, so thankfully my mother gracefully accepted our plea to temporarily take one of the cats. She chose Mimsie and is now a doting slave to his every whim, and there is no way she will ever give him back, and quite frankly there is no way he would want to leave cat paradise. And as for our family, there’s been an addition with the arrival of Lucy, a strawberry blonde terrier whirlwind who has the sweetest nature. We sometimes have trouble teaching her good manners, but Zoe doesn’t – if she starts pestering him he just lifts up his paw and gives her a karate chop, but then allows her to snuggle up to him in bed.