It’s been a year now so…

On 13th October 2025 we had to say goodbye to my cat Chomper. Well, our cat, but to me he will always be ‘my cat’. We always joked about how Chomper was more like me (high-strung, particular, ‘no touch’) and Pretzel was more like my husband (loves food and attention, easily manipulated). The clincher though was how Chomper would completely ignore my husband calling him, but one word from me and he would come running 🤣 I loved him so much.

Chomper Joins The Family

So another reason why Chomper is ‘my cat’ is because I chose Chomper (whereas my husband chose Pretzel). We had bought a house so no longer had to worry about no-pet rent conditions and decided we wanted a cat. We were also both in agreeance that we wanted to adopt from Cat Haven because we wanted to give a kitty a chance at a new life rather than get any sort of fancy breed. For me at least, as someone with an environmental background and knowing the havoc cats can wreak on our native fauna, this was a compromise between that issue and my love for cats.

I thought Chomper looked so cute and he sounded pretty sweet in the description. I also liked his colouring and his name (I was playing Bravely Default at the time and the enemy that gives you heaps of EXP in that game are called Chompers haha). So we went to visit his foster home and see him, although he stayed under the couch the whole time. The foster carer told us that Chomper got along with his cat but he suspected he had been abused as a kitten due to the extreme way he responded to being scolded and his fear of being carried near walls 😢 I was probably already set on Chomper but how could that not make you want to be that better owner?

After we took him home he was a true scaredy cat and took to hiding behind my piano (hence one of my then work colleague and friend calling him Piano Cat 😝). It took him about 3 months to warm up to us. At night we would leave the door to his safe room open and could hear him tentatively exploring, getting a little further through the house each time. My husband said he got first pats which made me jealous but I honestly don’t rmb haha. He never really got over being scared of people other than us, but being comfortable with us was all that really mattered.

Chomperisms

The Bad:

• Overgrooming
• Pooping outside litter tray
• Scratching furniture
• Terrified of rain, vacuum cleaner, thunder and the range hood/smoke alarm
• Loved plastic and ribbons (I was more worried about him choking on the stuff than the damage he caused)
• Always threw up in lots of three for some reason

The Good:

• Dextrous and quite intelligent
• Loved couch time
• Social Rolls
• Finding him in new places like on the cat tower, top of the buffet, in my clothing drawers, cat tunnel, cat castle

The Quirky:

• Chomps of love
• Chomp 360
• Slapping
• No Touch Mode
• Chasey with food man
• Running jumps and sliding
• Table self pats
• One eyed Chomp
• Shocking self out of sleep
• Very fussy about sitting on laps
• Huffing
• Food toys – scooping straight into his mouth from the interactive feeder, jumping for the bell toy
• Loved very forceful head rubs
• Tail whipping

Chomper Stories

• He was a very pretty boy, everyone thought he was a girl
• Early on, in our old house we had a broken cat flap (it had no flap) in one of our sliding doors and I accidentally left the glass door open so Chomper decided to go outside and after chasing him around our house for a bit he decided to hide in our extremely overgrown garden. So my husband went to try and (literally) flush him out by pouring water on him with a watering can from the roadside of the fence, but Chomper didn’t move at all, but maybe it shocked him enough I could push my way through the vegetation to grab him 😅 Poor guy, it must have been so traumatic.
• He was so terrified one time we took him to the vet he peed himself, so the vet gave us a free shampoo sample. So my husband took him into the shower and the poor guy kept trying to escape through the glass and in the end came out smelling like coconut LOL
• He loved rubbing his head against the R button on the Wii U gamepad/Switch pro controller, often making me throw Splash Walls off the stage 😅
• He really liked watching the Squid Sisters news and the Game of Thrones crow
• There was one time not long after we adopted him where he jumped up onto our bed and made an almighty BOOF noise LOL
• One time we went on vacation and my husband set up motion cameras on the automatic feeder and then realised he could speak through it, so poor Chomper and Pretzel came running but then couldn’t find him and got soooo confused.
• When we temporarily moved into my parents house, he was super scared and would barely make it down the corridor (the cat’s room was at the far end of the corridor) while Pretzel was already owning the house
• For some reason my husband and I had a joke about whenever we heard helicopter noises, that they were out to find guilty Chomper
• He loved it when anyone sat on the IKEA day bed in my husband’s office
• He also loved playing with the quilt/blankets on top of beds. You just had to rustle it and he would go full hunting mode
• He really liked playing with pen tips and ethernet cables, ropes and string.
• He loved Greenies and my husband would place some on top of the really tall cat scratching post and he would jump really high to swipe them off
• When our nephew was really young he wanted to pat Chomper and everyone kept telling him if the cat is hiding, it’s scared so you should leave it alone, but he didn’t listen and got proper chomped (serves him right)
• On the topic of kids, all the kids loved him (I guess they just like cats) but he would always hide from them
• In general he hid from most people but he would come out for my mum, my husband’s sister and our fellow cat friend S
• He loved kangaroo kicking bath mats. Sometimes towels too but he really liked one particular bath mat of ours.
• He used to like sticking his paw underneath closed doors (like the toilet door lol) and playing
• He was the bird watcher out of our two cats
• Since he was such a scaredy cat we would always find him in interesting places – all the way in the back of the pantry/walk-in-linen
• Since he was an over-groomer we tried a couple of things…there was the plastic cone which he ended up being pretty ok with one he realised he could bulldoze Pretzel with it, the soft toast shaped ‘cone’ and an anxiety reducing jacket which actually probably made him depressed (we called it the sadness jacket)
• There was one time my husband asked me to turn on his coffee machine so I picked up Chomper and asked him to turn it on for me and he splayed his front legs out and actually ended up hitting the ON button 😁
• He would jump onto the barstools but with too much force, so the chair would actually fall over. He got the hang of it eventually.
• He loved sitting on my fabric piles (which gave me lots of excuses to make quilts to protect my fabric haha).

Chomper and Other Cats

Chomper & Pretzel

• Chomper loved to initiate play fights but often they would devolve into real fights and he would always lose (Pretzel basically would body slam him lol)
• We used to put cushions around the house and thought the cats were taking turns on the different cushions but then we realised Pretzel would wait for Chomper to warm one up then stand over him and basically intimidate Chomper off 😅
• But every now and then you’d see them snuggled right up to each other and that’s when you knew it was COLD lol
• Chomper was the good boy and would dob Pretzel in if he was doing bad things. There was one time when we were living in my parent’s house while ours was being built and staying in my old bedroom. It was really stuffy so we opened the window, not realising my parents had removed the fly screen and Pretzel got out. We only realised because Chomper wouldn’t stop yelling 😂
• Chomper would meow insistently whenever Pretzel snuck into and got locked in the garage to alert us to the situation and save Pretzel from his self-inflicted prison
• When we used the auto feeder both cats would pathetically start waiting in front of it over an hour before it was set to fire lol.
• Chomper would ‘sneak up’ on Pretzel from the front and then often chicken out last minute when he belatedly realised that Pretzel was aware of what he was doing
• Chomper was the dexterous cat and was really quite good at the test tube enrichment toy and could set it spinning with finesse…the only issue was Pretzel would wait for Chomper to spin the tube and pounce on the treat that came out 😅
• Chomper would go out of his way to slap Pretzel while waiting for my husband to prepare their food. Cue the classic kitty air boxing haha
• Chomper wasn’t very cat like, and over time it felt like he was learning how to be a cat from Pretzel
• After Chomper passed, it became glaringly obvious how active and vocal he was. Once Pretzel realised Chomper wasn’t coming back he became a super sloth and just slept all day. Chomper was the one getting him up and moving, often by yelling for him 🥲
• Honestly Chomper going first was probably a blessing in disguise. If Pretzel went first, I think Chomper would have been distraught. Pretzel kinda came to terms with it pretty fast. Although it brought tears and laughter in the first day after when Pretzel was obviously searching for Chomper…somehow expecting him to be hidden in the small opening at the base of one of my bookshelves??? Pretzel with the ginger cat one brain cell I guess.

Sammy

Sammy was the wandering neighbourhood cat. Apparently other people found him a real menace – one of our neighbour’s who is allergic hated that he would sit on her outdoor furniture (fair enough). And we received a letter in our mailbox to ‘Sammy’s owner’ complaining about how he would force his way into their house and attack their cat. But he got along really well with our cats. He would come to one of the screen doors and our cats would come running just to hang out on the other side of the door with him. And then they would have roly poly parties where they would roll around on their respective sides.

Unfortunately we saw a post on Reddit many years before Chomper’s passing about how Sammy was missing. I guess they can roly poly together in cat heaven now.

Tissue

When we stayed with my parents due to family circumstances my brother’s chinchilla persian was sent to stay with us. Tissue just wanted to be friends! But Chomper was absolutely terrified of him, maybe because Tissue looked so different from the cats he was used to? They ended up having a bit of an uneasy truce. All three on bed was a nerve-wracking time 🤣 Especially since Tissue never looked before he leaped lol.

In Memorium

I took such a long time to write this post because I wanted to note down every little thing I could remember of him. As my first pet, I had no idea what to expect when he passed. I’m quite glad that we were able to pay for a private cremation so we could receive his ashes. We also bought (must be a lucrative industry) a paw print and I had it put onto a charm that I have on my phone. We ended up burying him in front of the scullery window because he loved to sit in that spot and gaze out the window. We planted some white kangaroo paws on top because the colour reminded me of his fur colour a bit, plus they are a bit fuzzy.

In May 2026, we decided that Pretzel needed a companion and so we adopted Button as a 3 month old kitten. I always find it sweet when she plays with ‘Chomper’ dangling from my phone, even though that’s just me being sentimental.

RIP Chomper, I still think of you and tear up every now and then ❤️

Categories: Miscellaneous

hikaru