A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

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A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN
by Peggy Elliott

Have you ever felt you knew just about all there was to know about a particular
subject only to find you still had a lot to learn? This is precisely what happened
to Doug and Peggy Elliott (both long-time leaders in the National Federation
of the Blind) when they brought a baby kitten who happened to be blind into
their household. Here is how Peggy tells the story:

We have a new little kitten at our house.
She’s all black, but she had a tiny white star on her chest when she was born.
It’s grown in black now, but we still call her Sheriff.

Sheriff is four months old. Everything in her
world is a toy to bat, chase, gnaw, or pounce upon. She is endlessly hungry, begs for
everything, steals the two older cats’ food, and sneaks on the table to cadge tidbits
from us. Oh, and I should have mentioned, Sheriff is blind.

My husband Doug and I are both blind. We heard
about Sheriff from a friend who took pity on a starving stray cat and soon learned the cat
was a mom with two little kittens. When she was tiny, Sheriff put her head on the flank of
one of her sisters to follow her to food and play. The little sister did not survive, and
Sheriff had an incurable eye infection from birth that left her completely blind.

Our friend told us about his blind kitten,
mentioning that he did not have any takers for this perfectly healthy, happy, bouncy
kitten because she was blind. We knew what that could mean, and we offered to take Sheriff
if no one else wanted her. We wouldn’t give her up now to anybody.

We were worried about stairs, her finding the cat
boxes, and interaction with the other cats whom we now call the Great Cats in comparison
to little Sheriff. Here’s how each of these worked.

At first we kept Sheriff in a room with a
cardboard box across the door. This prevented her from getting out, but we and the Great
Cats could get in. We were worried that, if we let Sheriff roam, she would fall down one
of our two staircases, both of which have turns in them. We got a bell on a blue collar so
that we could find Sheriff and avoid stepping on her. We would put the collar on only when
we were taking her out of the room. She got so she purred when we put the collar on.

We tried to show her stairs, making her little
feet look at the edges and risers. She didn’t like the lessons. We made her go down,
one stair at a time, to get the idea. She hated this. Then, one day about a week after we
had Sheriff, we noticed that she was upstairs.

We had put her on the floor downstairs to play
and gone about our business, keeping an ear on her movements, or so we thought. Suddenly,
she was upstairs. It turned out that Sheriff knew all about stairs. There was a short
flight in her original home in a garage, and she had used them from the time she was tiny.
She still kind of galumps down the stairs, being a little too short from nose to tail to
walk down yet. But she obviously will. She’s taught us that. We tried to protect her,
to ease her into our home a bit at a time. She wasn’t having any of that.

We talked about this and decided that, even as
long as we have both lived as blind people, we can still learn about the capabilities of
the blind. In fact, both of us have had experiences where people think we can’t do
something and (from what they intend as kindness), prevent us from doing it. Stairs are
one example.

We were recently in Washington D.C. visiting our
Congressman, and we were heading out of the building to get a cab. As we approached the
door, a Capitol guard prevented us from going any farther, telling us that she would
"take us" to a door without stairs.

We had chosen this particular door because it got
us where we were going. Had we been "taken" to any other door, stairs or not, it
would have been a lot farther from our destination. We insisted; she relented, and we
exited as planned, stepping down the stairs as agilely as sighted visitors. I
couldn’t help thinking of Sheriff and the help we had tried so hard to give her as I
descended.

Regarding accidents, we simply haven’t had
any. We don’t exactly know how she finds the cat boxes (we have two, one on each
floor). We guess it is by using her sense of where she is as well as her nose. Early on,
we worked very hard at being sure she was back in her room every two hours or so when she
was a one-room kitten to be sure she would be near a box she knew. Just like with the
stairs, one day we noticed that a cat was scratching in the downstairs cat box, and each
of us had a Great Cat on our laps. So much for thinking Sheriff couldn’t find the cat
box.

How about the other cats? GirlKitty is deeply
suspicious of everyone but Doug whom she loves. Before Sheriff was even out of the
carrying case in which she entered our house, GirlKitty was at the front door, glaring
through the bars and hissing. In fact, we started calling her Miss Propane because she put
her whole body into the effort, sounding like one of those propane tanks that cause lift
in hot air balloons. She would even propane at Doug if he had been holding Sheriff, and
she got a whiff of it.

In the early days, GirlKitty would punch Sheriff
occasionally; you could hear Sheriff sort of go flying the other direction from the one
she had been heading in. And once I think GirlKitty was actually holding her down and
socking her—I was in the next room on the phone and, by the time I got in there, they
were separated. But the thing we noticed most was that Sheriff never reacted to these
expressions of disgust by GirlKitty. They were usually delivered right in Sheriff’s
face. But her body didn’t move at all. We knew because the bell didn’t tinkle.

We talked about this as well, relating it to our
own experiences. Eye contact is crucial to cat communication, but it’s very important
to people as well.

GirlKitty seemed very puzzled that she was
getting no reaction from her fierce glare and hiss. We have both known people who were
very uncomfortable talking to us. It has often seemed to us that part of the discomfort
comes from lack of eye contact and uncertainty on the sighted person’s part that we
can detect they are talking to us.

In Sheriff’s case, of course, it just may be
that Sheriff has better manners than GirlKitty. Anyway, she’s found her own form of
revenge. GirlKitty is very food-focused since she almost died as a baby from lack of
nourishment. For a while, she said horrible things to Sheriff when the little kitten would
try to join the Great Cats at the dry food dish. So Sheriff figured out that she could fit
under the kitchen stool that happens to sit next to the cats’ food station. GirlKitty
can’t.

So Sheriff gets under the stool and sticks her
head out long enough to grab some food and then withdraws under the stool to eat.
GirlKitty can’t do a thing about it except stalk off in distaste. We didn’t
teach Sheriff about the stool. She figured it out for herself.

And then there’s Bob, our large, mellow,
kindly, clingy male. One day early on when Bob was eating, I put Sheriff on his back. Bob
kept eating. Sheriff slid off on purpose. I put her back. Bob kept eating. This went on
for a while because I was trying to teach Sheriff that one of the Great Cats was not a
meanie. She learned.

When she finds Bob now, she jumps up on his
shoulder or up his side in play. Bobby will sort of run and fight back appropriately, not
knocking Sheriff across the room as he easily could but batting and taking evasive action
as part of the game. They tussle like that. Then Sheriff loses physical contact and starts
looking around with her paws for Bobby. (Doug calls her Scatters when she does
this—running back and forth in very short spurts in a search pattern.)

If she doesn’t find Bobby and he still wants
to play, he will scrabble his back claws very fast on the linoleum or hardwood. Sheriff
hears this and jumps. They start the cycle again.

Doug and I have laughed about this as well,
having met people in our lives who are immediately comfortable with us, realizing that,
although we respond to oral instead of visible cues, we are otherwise pretty much just
ordinary people. Bobby got that idea right away with Sheriff. But he also tires of the
kitten’s endless playfulness. When this happens, he vaults over Sheriff and trots
off.

Sheriff is still learning. When she came to us at
six weeks old, she was too small to look at chairs with her paws and understand them. We
would hold her in a chair and then put her down. She learned to climb up the upholstered
recliner in her first room using claws, but she often misjudged and fell down before she
learned.

She’s now four months old and has a much
longer wheel base from nose to tail. She has looked at the kitchen chairs with her paws,
figured out how they are made, learned that they are comfortable, and now regularly hops
into one or another. That is how she gets on the table. I now keep the chair next to mine
pushed in all the way. Sheriff can get her head and upper arms up on the table but not the
rest of her. So she sits there when I’m eating, for all the world like a little cat
person except that she’d rather be onthe table helping me with dinner.

And she applied her knowledge about kitchen
chairs to all the other seating devices in our house. You never know now in which chair or
sofa you will find her. We didn’t teach her about chairs at all. By the time she
learned, we had figured out that she did better learning on her own. We just get out of
the way and let her explore. She does just that.

There are lots of other stories I’d love to
tell: Like the fact that Sheriff gets in the middle of a wide open space like the kitchen
floor and just plain dances—hopping and jumping and leaping to music only she can
hear. Like the swisher toy we have—long strips of plastic attached to a rigid stick
that you can shake in the air or tap on the ground, moving it around quickly for Sheriff
to hear and attack, which she does with the same speed a sighted kitten would. Like the
Great Cats hiding when the new bathroom was being put in while Sheriff hung around outside
the door, listening and smelling and talking with the workers, as fascinated as the Great
Cats were scared.

But I won’t. Instead, I’ll just say that Doug and I have been in
the National Federation of the Blind for a long time and worked hard to learn
that we can handle daily living tasks, jobs, home management just like our sighted
associates. And we have both worked hard to spread that word to our fellow blind
brothers and sisters as well as to our sighted friends. Even so, in the last
three months, we’ve learned again the lesson of how easy it is to underestimate
the capabilities of the blind. We were taught this lesson by a little black
kitten we call Sheriff.