I have two cats; they're both tabbies, but their personalities are very different.
Tiny is a big, muscular cat who weighs about 13 pounds; he's scared of the vacuum cleaner and strangers. When scared, he attacks the nearest moving object... took me a while to redirect him to socks stuffed full of plastic bags, which are big enough for him to wrestle with, instead of biting my ankles! He's an ex-stray, currently 1 1/2 years old. I assumed he was dumped as a kitten, because I saw him around the neighborhood for quite a while before I took him in. He still has some feral tendencies, as well as the canny common sense of a stray cat.
Baby Girl is a small cat with soft fur. She's cute, and she knows it. She came to live with me when I opened the door and she walked in as though she owned the place. Turned out she belonged to the neighbors, who hardly ever fed her and let her flea problem go untreated. After a month, they noticed I was taking care of her and let me have her. She's currently flea-free and healthy and up to a normal weight, but she's still a little neurotic about not getting enough food. Whenever she's scared, she mews, brushes against your ankles, and generally acts "cute"! It took me a while to convince her that she was going to be fed enough, and now she only begs around mealtimes, instead of constantly. Baby Girl's two years old and capable of jumping over three feet straight into the air to catch a toy.
I'm also fostering a dilute calico named Christy. At the shelter, she was overwhelmed by the presence of fifty other cats and spent all her time hiding. The only part of her personality we could see there was that she hissed whenever she saw another cat. She's coming out of her shell now, exploring, though she still retreats to a dog crate which I keep with the door propped open for her to go to when she feels scared. She's finicky. For four days after I got her here, she ate hardly anything. I still have to tempt her with stinky canned food because she won't touch dry food. When she came here her breathing was noisy because she had made a habit of sleeping in her litter box, and the ammonia and dust were irritating her respiratory system. She's breathing well now, and that's probably the cause of the decrease in her anorexia, since she can smell the food now. She's downright beautiful; her looks make it more probable that I can find someone who will give her a good home--preferably as an only cat or with a sedate older cat. My cats still stress her out a little, since they're both young and would like to play with her.
Better watch out: I might bite.
If you do, I will set Tiny on you! He is very good at biting back.
