Bobby the blind cat
A
shelter in Billings asked if we could take Bobby. He had been
there for several months and no one would adopt him because
he was blind.
Bobby had come to the shelter from a home where the children called him "retard" because he walked into things. It must not have been a pleasant place for a blind cat to live.
As soon as Bobby arrived, we noticed something in him that is so common among our disabled animals: He doesn't think he's handicapped. He runs around the cat house, jumps over crates, and hops on to the window ledge - all at full speed. If you watched him you wouldn't think he's blind. But then <crash!> he will walk right into the cat tree.
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What Bobby has done is memorized the layout of everything in the cat house, and he follows this mental map as he navigates his way around. Most of the time the map serves him well, but if he turns around too often, or gets startled by a sudden noise, he loses his bearings. And that's when he will bang into something … like the cat tree or another cat. (Hey, you can't program everything!)
It's an amazing sight to watch this fearless youngster move around. For instance, he may want to get to a cat bed that's on top of a crate a few feet away, and there's a Rubbermaid tub between him and the cat bed up there. The safe, sensible (i.e., boring) way to get there would be to step around the Rubbermaid tub and carefully climb up to the cat bed. But that's not how Bobby does it!
Instead, he prefers the airborne approach. He jumps from the floor into the air, leaps over the Rubbermaid tub, and lands on the cat bed on the other side. You can tell from the way he holds his feet in the air that he doesn't know exactly where he is in space or just when he will hit the surface, but land on that cat bed he does. (This might be the blind cat version of the aviation term, "controlled flight into terrain.")
The other, more sedate cats wonder who this kid is who ricochets around the cat house like the cartoon character Road Runner. Other times they think he's more like a Sidewinder missile with a slight wiring problem. They generally just try to get out of his way as fast as possible.
