Choosing their name is one of the most exciting things about getting a pet.
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If your new pet already has one though, it gets complicated, especially when they’re older than a newborn and therefore still largely unfamiliar with it.
The Hardings had still intended to change the name of the six-month-old rescue kitten they adopted from Greater Shepparton’s cat adoption day on June 1, this year.
The kids in the family were 13, 15 and 16 and it was the first time they’d owned a cat. They had to get naming rights.
However, when they looked up the meaning behind the name she’d already been given — Selkie — they changed their minds and kept it.
Selkies are mythological creatures, said to be able to shapeshift between seal and human forms.
While Selkie doesn’t exactly look like a human or a seal, and is undeniably opposed to submerging herself in water, her coat is grey and velvety sleek like a seal’s.
The descriptor that stuck with the Hardings being synonymous with their new pet’s nature was that selkies have a dual nature: they can be friendly and helpful to humans, but they can also be dangerous and vengeful.
While they know their now nine-month-old kitty isn’t dangerous or vengeful (except maybe to the resident dog), her moods do fiercely swing like an aggressively pushed pendulum knocked out of kilter.
When you are impounded at just a few weeks’ old and spend your first six months of life in the local lock-up, it’s probably no surprise you’d develop an attitude and an understandable volume of distrust.
Alas, three months after her emancipation, Selkie is now letting the humans touch her. Only on her terms, of course.
1. She must be inside. If she’s outside, you can forget about permission to pat her velvety paws.
2. She must be sleepy. Usually first thing in the morning when she wakes up on one of the beds she was never going to be allowed to sleep on. But also late at night. Also on one of those forbidden beds.
3. If she’s feeling playful, you must be prepared to offer your hands, somewhat sacrificially, for her to bat at with extended claws. You also must offer up any boxes, curtains and rugs for shredding, despite providing what you believe to be ample actual scratching posts.
4. If you’re bringing her food (which she’ll yell at you to do), you may pet her briefly as she circles figure 8s around your ankles, but do not, I repeat, do not take too long to put the bowl on her mat unless you fancy yourself some grated shins. And, whatever you do, don’t interfere with her life’s highest priority: eating.
5. If you make a circle with your thumb and pointer finger and hold it near her, she will push her head through it over and over again.
Selkie grows bolder each day, venturing into the territory of her nemesis, the dog, possibly to taunt her.
The dog is still just as fixated on her unsettling presence as the first day Selkie unexpectedly arrived through the door inside a plastic cat carrier gently swinging by her humans’ sides.
That one seemingly ordinary day, in her obvious opinion, that took a turn for the worse.
“When will they take this meowing thing back to wherever they got her from?” she asks with her eyes.
As the oldest Harding child, Felix, says, the dog’s biggest inconvenience in life is not being allowed to eat the family cat.
Maybe by the first day of next winter, the pair will have made amends and be able to keep each other warm at night in a shared space.
And maybe mythological seal-like creatures might fly.