Maddie and Perkins

Maddie. Been trying it out for a couple days. Don't know if it's going to take. But Madonna seems unwieldy--it's the name she came with and I frankly didn't have any better ideas. Mostly we call her "the kitten", but now that her size is beginning to rival Stevie's, that is starting to seem less like a workable solution for the long term...

One point in favor of the name is that the girl does seem to have a touch of the madness. Case in point, now that Perkins has made it fairly clear that he has no plans to eat her, she's gotten downright bold. I'm still feeling tentative about the degree to which I can trust a dog with a strong prey drive to be gentle with a small animal. But Maddie has decided it's perfectly okay to bat at his tail as if it were a toy. She is, at least, smart enough to wait until I've clipped a leash to Perkins' collar before pulling this move. Still it gets me thinking "What exactly is the difference between doing something "bold" and doing something "stupid". I guess the answer to that question, at least in part, is, do you live to tell the tale?

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Really wish I could have caught a picture of these two that looked a little less like Perkins was tasting Madonna (okay, I will most likely go back and forth with the names). But the interactions tend to be brief, and the other two pics I got were much blurrier. So you'll have to take my word for it that there have been downright sweet moments in which Perkins licks the cat on the nose, or she affectionately rubs the top of her head against his face. I am still careful not to leave them unsupervised in a room together, but it does appear that these two are sorta kinda working out something like a friendship.