November 8, 2024. I decided I might need some light in my life and went to HSHV to find comfort in petting cats.

Enter stage right, the biggest cat I have ever seen. Dubbed Twitchy Tail, I immediately felt for him. I thought it was cruel, to name him after his visible anxiety. Wouldn’t we all be anxious in his situation? We made eye contact, fleeting, but it told me everything I needed to know. I could see how overwhelmed he was by the noise, the lights, everything. Despite it, he was holding it together. He seemed so calm, except for his tail tip twitching. I have felt that kind of overstimulation too. I felt such sympathy for him. I knew my apartment would be a less stressful place for him. I signed the paperwork barely having met him.

His name came to me while in the parking lot, before I’d even gotten to the car. Butch!

The staff had told me a lot about him. He was calm, quiet, he didn’t like head pets, but when he warmed up to you he liked long strokes down his back. He wasn’t big into playing. I was expecting a cat who existed in the same space as me without much interaction.

The first evening he came home, he spent his first couple of hours decompressing in my bathtub where it was dark and quiet. It’s all been up from there. He got comfortable so quickly. He is so chatty! Not a peep in the shelter, but at home it’s constant mrrps. After a month, he started to show interest in wand toys (without bells). Now we play hide and seek! He sleeps in my bed. He sleeps on my chest! He does not like getting brushed, but he will sit on the counter and request that he be combed while he looks at himself in the mirror.

I could not be happier that Butch is so unlike his description. At the base level, he is what he was described to me, but being without the stress of shelter living has allowed him to thrive and his true self to really show. And his tail still twitches! It was never a sign of anxiety for him. It’s only ever still when he’s sound asleep, and even then sometimes it twitches in his dreams.

The photo is from one is his frequently enjoyed past times: laying on my chest in bed and using me as a perch to look out his third favorite window.