Neelix (born 4th December 2002)

When Rocky passed away, he left a hole in my heart and an empty house. I decided to get another cat straight away. As a breed, the Ragdoll cat is very close in temperament to Rocky, so I went looking for Ragdoll breeders. I sent emails off to 4 different breeders asking for kitten availability, and only one responded. She had a male blue mitted ready to be picked up straight away. So I drove the 2 hours to go and pick him up. I had already decided to call him Neelix, after a character from Star Trek.

I had researched Ragdolls on the internet, but I've never had a pure breed cat before and didn't really know what to look for. When I was at the breeder's house, the kittens didn't seem all that interested in me, and didn't want to be picked up. The breeder said they were unsettled because of some construction work noise from the back yard. I asked her how the kitten would travel in the car for 2 hours, and her response was something like "I took them to a show last week and one of them cried but I don't know which one it was.".

Neelix cried all the way home and tried to bite his way out of the carrier. He hid under the couch and wouldn't come out for the first 2 days. He did his solids in the litter tray, but urinated in the bath tub. He wouldn't let me near him. I soon realised that the breeder had not socialised him at all. A week later, some fur came of his nose and I queried the breeder about it as I thought it may have been ringworm. Her exact response was "Regarding the fur off that he has on his nose I meant to mention to you that he did this on the Sunday before you got him as he didn't like the car ride to the show and rubbed all the fur off by pushing to get out, as he didn't have a mark on his nose before we started to the show." So she did know that he didn't travel well in the car. This means she lied to me when I asked her how he would travel. I also suspect that someone else had taken the kitten and returned him, as someone's else name was on the registration papers. The breeder did, however, reprint the papers with my name on them.

Yes, I could have returned him and asked for a refund, but I wonder what sort of a life he would have had then...

I worked very hard to earn Neelix's trust, and I soon realised how intelligent he was when he started returning the toy mouse I had thrown. A kitten who fetches - how cool is that? I knew my hard work was finally paying off when he let me remove a loose baby tooth that he couldn't dislodge himself.

Check out my Photo Diary link to the left, to see more photos of Neelix.