She was a feral who was trapped with four of her kittens over the summer. Another momma cat didn't make it, and so she also nursed two more kittens in addition to her own while in foster care. Apparently she didn't like people much so she was dubbed "Scary Spice". Once her kittens were weaned she went to the Fort Collins Cat Rescue where they renamed her "Salida" in an effort to make her more adoptable. I needed a feral cat to take care of mouse control in the garage and it doesn't bother me a bit to have a garage cat who is not people-friendly, so I took her when the rescue contacted me and said she was available after being spayed, vaccinated, and dewormed. I also shortened her name to Sal.
Sal lived in a large dog crate for the first two weeks she was here so that she would learn how things work: she is safe, food arrives twice daily, her litter box is cleaned regularly, and she has her own cardboard box full of blankets to hide in. After a couple weeks, once she understood that the human was the bearer of food and that the food would arrive in a metal bowl, I opened her crate door at night. She slowly graduated to meandering around the garage. Initially she was completely silent, about three weeks after arriving she began hissing at me whenever she saw me. A week or two after that she gradually transitioned to a combination of hissing and meowing, and now she always meows at me. Just this week she began allowing me to touch her when I brought her food for meals, and today she actually reached out and tapped my hand with her paw for the first time. This contact was partly to be affectionate and partly to express that I needed to hurry up with dinner, because it just doesn't seem right in a cat's mind that the barn dogs should eat first.
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