VAMama
bless your heart for taking in Cosette!Traumatized kitties can be tough to deal with, but you love them anyway.
My Big Boy is a Maine Coon mix my roommate rescued from a house he was helping rebuild in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA (near LA) which, while a ritzy area, also has lots of places for carnivores like coyotes to hide in the various parks, ravines, etc.
Big Boy, I'm pretty sure, isn't a feral, but might have been forced into a semi-feral lifestyle. He obviously had people feeding him, and he wasn't interested in gobbling everything (true feral experts are welcome to say I'm wrong). He wouldn't eat people food I offered him, and ate lots of dry cat food.
When I first got him about 2015, more or less, I had four other cats, and he went into hiding and mostly stayed there, coming out to eat, drink or poop, then going into hiding again. He didn't like to interact with the other cats, and he let them bully him. He appeared to have been traumatized at some point, because of various things he did. One was to hide under the bed, refuse to come out, and cry when you tried to force him anyway. Another was when the police copters were flying noisily overhead looking for someone, and he started to cry, and I picked him up and he cried into my armpit. Or, he might just have been a big scaredy cat. (He was about 25 pounds when I got him.)
But, gradually, with soft talk and few treats, he warmed up to me, bit by bit. He spent most of his time in my bedroom, at least while I was home. He'd spend the night in the closet, but came out more and more often to sit on the bed.
One night, when I was half-asleep, he kind of flopped himself over my head and started that breathless, ecstatic purring like a diesel truck, of a kitty in a loving mood. The Luv Badger . . . .
Now that he's getting old, he's gotten a lot more loving and needy, and much less inclined to stay in hiding.
That’s him in the picture below.
