Meet Troubled!
Name: Troubled (a/k/a Chubbled)
Breed: Orange Tabby
Likes: Sucking his fluffy blanket and kneading it; hiding under the dining room table while someone walks in circles dragging a string around the table for him to pounce on; drinking water from a teacup; Frisky treats (Original flavor); running out into the hallway of the apartment building.
Dislikes: Car rides, leaving the apartment building, the vet’s office, feet, getting wet, and people touching his belly.
About Troubled: One cold evening, in December 2008, a woman who did not like cats bought a home in Columbia Heights. On the eve of the settlement, the prior owners of the house told her they had been feeding three feral cats (three sisters) in the alley behind the house that they had trapped, neutered and released. The woman agreed to keep feeding the cats, as a preventative measure to guard against mice/rats. Every night, the woman would set out a bowl of food for each cat. One day, she noticed a HUGE cat had started coming around the alley, and he would run to each of the other cats’ bowls to steal their food. If they tried to get near him, he would bite them. He would frequently roam the alley at night and try to attack the sister cats. Other times, weeks would go by and no one would see the big cat, but eventually he would return to terrorize the 3 sister cats. The prior owners of the house said that this big boy cat had already been neutered by someone else (he had a clipped ear) but they weren’t really sure where he came from/where he would go. That summer, whenever the woman who owned the house went in the backyard to water her tomato plants, the big boy cat would run inside the back door. He seemed curious and scared, but mostly he seemed mad. She named him “Troubled.” Every time he ran inside the house, the woman would lure him right back out to the backyard with wet canned food. One day, the woman decided to paint the back of her house. Not realizing Troubled was standing behind her waiting to get his head scratched, she stepped backward and tripped over him. He bit her so hard that she ended up in the hospital. As summer turned into winter, Troubled became more desperate to come inside. The rain would fall and he would cry for hours at the back door. One of the neighbors suggested to the woman that she might want to adopt him and advised that, given how much Troubled despised the other cats, he was probably meant to be an only child. One day, the woman decided that she would pick up a litter box at the store “just in case.” A couple of weeks went by and one night, at 3am, the woman woke up because she heard someone trying to break in through her front door. She called the police and crouched in a corner watching the front door as someone kept trying to turn the door handle and pushing up against it. The police dispatcher stayed on the phone with the woman until the police arrived. When the woman heard the sirens and saw the flashing blue/red lights outside her window, she opened the front door. Instead of a burglar, Troubled the cat ran inside! It turned out, Troubled had been jumping on the door handle over and over again, which caused the knob on the inside to turn. After that night in November 2009, the woman decided Troubled must have really wanted a real home if he had braved the streets (where cars would whizz by) and that he must be a very smart cat to have figured out which house belonged to her (even though he had only ever seen the back of the house). So the woman agreed that he could stay.
A couple years later, Troubled and his mom moved to a new condo. Troubled loves his new home and was relieved to be far, far away from the alley of his troubled beginnings. He is now a chubby little guy and goes by the nickname Chubbled.