Haven't you suffered enough?
Only joking, but of course...
Heh. Renfield was actually an exceptional cat, and we miss him terribly. We had him for sixteen years. He was very much a Velcro cat; if he wasn't directly on my lap or on my husband's legs, he'd be very close by. He purred readily (sometimes all I'd have to do was look at him), and he listened whenever I asked him to move on the bed so I could put hubby in it. He'd sometimes take wheelchair rides on hubby's lap while I pushed him around the house. He still had his claws, but only used them on the scratching post. (Okay, sometimes he'd use them on the wheels of hubby's chair, but he'd stop when I told him to.) He'd wake me up in the morning to feed him, sometimes, by tapping my cheek lightly with his paw, no claws. He was scary smart, but not in a destructive way. When we had Vladimir, our German Shepherd (passed in 07 due to metastatic cancer in his chest), the two got on very well, sometimes even napping together. I'll leave you to guess who got the bigger share of the dogbed space. On the (more frequent than I'd like) occasions when hubby has gone into the hospital, Reni was my only company at home.
Little story about him: When we first got Reni, he was a stray, found running across Mom-in-law's yard shortly after Smokey, our first GSD, was put down due to failing health. We weren't certain of his behavior, so we locked him in the back bathroom at night, with his food and litter box. The bathroom door wasn't a standard door; it was a folding one with louvers, and about an inch gap between the bottom of it and the floor. Reni did not like this confinement. However, instead of yowling all night, spraying, or scratching the crap out of the door, he found another method to express his displeasure. He dug his *ahem* spoor out of the litterbox, and shot it underneath the bathroom door, through the mud room, and out into the kitchen. Where, the next morning, hubby's aunt (who we were living with) stepped on it.
We called it Reni's 'hat trick'. He never got locked in the bathroom overnight again, and we never had any behavior problems with him.
