Ruffie's life from about December of 2002 until we got him was rather turbulent. We adopted him in the spring of 2003 but he lived most of his life with his former owner who passed away about 6-7 months before we got him. She was an elderly lady and Ruffie lived about 16 or 17 of his kitty years with her, alone without any other kitties to contend with or even any other dogs, that we know of. When his "mom" died, the woman's granddaughter said she tried to adapt him to her household with her cats but it didn't work. So she took Ruffie back to the home he had lived for 16 years and put him in a room alone, only coming back daily to feed him. I imagine the last seven months before we took custody of him were very lonely and sad. When we got him, the granddaughter was half an hour away from putting him to sleep because he was in the way of an estate auction of her grandmother's house. So, to the rescue we came! He lived in the Snoopsonian for his 1½ years with us and as you can tell by the picture above, rather contentedly. He use to venture out of the room every now and then to see if dinner was ready and even got to the point of not minding the other animals when they sometimes wandered into his room. He became accustomed to Herb and me visiting, too, of course. The last week of his life we found out he could take under-the-skin fluid treatments which surprised us. But we figured maybe it was because he realized it made him feel better. We found out he had a tumor under his tongue on December 10, 2004, and the surgery he would have needed to remove it was just too radical for a kitty his age. So we had him euthanized that day while he was still under anesthesia. He was a sweet old guy who adapted quite nicely to our household, it just took a little time and a little patience. We will miss his "ruff" little meow and those big eyes of his. We hope he is happy up there with his real mom, bouncing around like he probably did as a youngster. We never got to see him like that but we found a picture that we imagine he might have looked like then, in Best Friends magazine in Sept-Oct 2004:
Rest in peace, Ruffness.
Snoopynut.com!
Ruffie
"Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat."
