Help! I Can’t Tell My Cats Apart!
“Are you Fat Zombie or Sweet Zombie? Let me look at your face,” I said, turning the cat’s head toward me. It was Fat Zombie. I could tell by his cheeks. If he were a human, he’d have dimples.
Sweet Zombie’s face is a perfect triangle.
When the Zombies were kittens, they were identical. I had no way to tell them apart, so they were both just “Zombie.” When I took them to get neutered, the vet tech called them “Zombie 1” and “Zombie 2” and swore that Zombie 1 had pink on his nose.
The vet tech must have been smoking crack. Neither Zombie has pink on them anywhere. They are gray. So very gray. The grayest.
Probably there were some differences, but I couldn’t see them yet. I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn’t matter whether twins are identical or fraternal, people will still get them confused. My twin and I are not identical. We look like sisters, but not twins. Yet I’ve been called “Sharon” so many times that I just go ahead and answer to it.
After they were neutered, one of the Zombies began to put on weight. Lots of it. Suddenly, I had a Fat Zombie and a skinny Zombie, who I misnamed “Sweet Zombie.” When he is sweet, he is very, very sweet. The rest of the time (actually, most of the time), he’s all claws and fangs — although he doesn’t mean it in anger. He’s just playful. And crazy. Oh, so crazy.
For most of his life, Sweet Zombie has been underweight. He got really sick when he was about a year old and almost died — he had a couple of seizures that scared the crap out of me. But within the last few months, he has started putting on weight.
Now, Sweet Zombie is almost as fat as Fat Zombie, and I have to see their faces to tell them apart.
They are both very aggressive cats, although Fat Zombie is more dominant. He beats up my cat Scooter every chance he gets — and he means it. He’s not playing. Sweet Zombie occasionally picks a fight with Ebenezer, but I think he really just wants to play. Sweet Zombie has no social skills, so he doesn’t have many friends among my other cats. However, my new cat, Frankie, adores Sweet Zombie .
They also cuddle differently. Fat Zombie sits on my lap every morning while I write. He sleeps on my pillow at night, pressed up against my head (Fat Zombie keeps my chiropractor in business). Fat Zombie also stands in the sink when I brush my teeth, which is always an inconvenience. Sweet Zombie only wants affection on my bed. If I’m reading, he’ll come drape himself across my lap. If I’m sleeping, he will cuddle up in the space under my chin, pressing himself as close to me as he can get. Sometimes, he rests his cheek on mine. Sweet Zombie never sits on my lap if I’m in my chair or on the couch. He basically ignores me anywhere else in the cabin— except the yoga mat. If I’m on the yoga mat, he wants to play.
I adore these cats. Originally, they were supposed to be barn cats. I live on a goat-and-chicken farm, and we had tons of mice in the chicken coop and goat barn. Fat, brazen mice who didn’t even run from us. So when a friend found a litter of kittens, I said I’d take them all. I had always been against keeping cats outside because of the difference in life expectancy between indoor and outdoor cats. And, as it turned out, Banshee and Dracula didn’t live very long at all. After Drac died — he was the sweetest of the litter — I started making the Zombies sleep in the house. After Sweet Zombie got sick and almost died, I stopped letting him go outside at all for fear he’d be out somewhere and have another seizure. And then my neighbor started letting his ginormous dogs run free — so Fat Zombie became a housecat, too. The mice have moved back into the chicken coop, but I’ll just have to count on the neighborhood snakes and owls to take care of it.
I love my Zombie cats. They have the biggest personalities of any cats I’ve ever known, which made it a little difficult to integrate them into the clowder. But they’re mostly fitting in now, with the exception of the rivalry between Fat Zombie and Scooter.
