9/10/09 Bella the Barbarian

It's been a week now since we have introduced Bella to our lovely home, and I thought you might enjoy an update.

Bella continues to be an adorable little bundle of feline cuteness. She's become incredibly fond of me, and enjoys following me around whenever I'm downstairs in the kitchen or living room. She also likes sitting outside on the screened-in porch. She's even adjusted nicely to her new food.

The rest of the cats are another story.

We expected the hissing and growls from the other boys when we first brought her home. Mason and Dixon did the same thing when Magellan and Sebastian first arrived, so some hostility was to be expected. They fuss, they growl, they get it out of their system, and after a week or so, the hissing gets less and less frequent. It's a cat thing. So when Bella arrived and the hisses erupted from all over the house, we were not surprised. I just hoped that it wouldn't scare sweet little Bella too much. After all, she's half the size of the other cats; she's such a dainty thing.

The good news, I suppose, is that Bella does not seem to be at all intimidated by the other cats' reaction. The bad news is that they are completely intimidated by her. It turns out that my delicate little feline flower is a total bully. She has decided that the kitchen and living room are now her domain, and any cat that wanders onto her turf gets immediately chased back up the stairs. (This is also accompanied with the sound of someone being hideously murdered...it really freaks you out when hearing it while being jolted out of a dead sleep at about 5am each morning).

Our little Bella the Barbarian has totally unhinged the other cats, who spend their days refusing to leave the relative safety of our bedroom. I have to put her out on the screened-in porch and bodily carry each cat down the stairs to the basement to get them to eat. When they do catch sight of her, there's still hissing, but the hissing is usually followed by turning and running away to escape the crazy she-devil that is hot on their tails. (Tony's taken to calling her Xena Warrior Princess instead of Bella. Several times a day, she'll go tearing through the house, chasing one of her unsuspecting brothers and yelling "YEIEIEIEIEIEIEIEI!" I wish I could explain just how odd it is to see a giant cat being chased by a tiny little cat 1/3 of his size). The good news is that she doesn't hurt them...she just chases them. The bad news is that they've all developed nervous tics and the habit of jumping out of their skin at the slightest sound. I'm afraid that pretty soon they'll all have to start taking kitty Prozac.

I'm really hoping that, like the hissing, this is another one of those things that will go away once they get to know her better (and vice versa). It's really getting crowded with 4 big cats in one room and one little tiny cat reining supreme over every other room in the house. Plus, it's really hard to scold something that looks so tiny and angelic all the time.

All hail the tiny warrior princess.