Cats can be so playful until it's time to finally act their age

Adjusting the cats' food for the third time in a week, I marveled at how like humans these felines are.

Like us, animals have different needs at different times. The indoor cats, now about 14 years old, are clearly slowing down.

Even Amber, fully feral when she came to us but mentally stuck at the age of a kitten, is finding she needs to take life a little slower these days.

Several times over the past few months, she managed to get up on a chair or bed, but then hesitates about jumping down, especially if she has been curled up asleep for several hours.

When we rescued her at a year or so old, during a T10 storm signal, her shoulder was badly torn, she was starving and half drowned. Rehabilitating her took weeks. Weeks in which she healed physically and took to indoor life with gusto but stayed at a mental age of about a year.

Determined never to be left outside again, she will explore the big outdoors, but only close beside one of her humans.

Yet, she still loves to tease and play like a kitten, hiding behind furniture, waiting to jump out on anyone, human or animal, which comes along.

As both cats spend more time these days sleeping, they don't need as much food.

In her younger days, Amber would eat everything in sight, now however, she has started copying Jade and breaking her meals into several sittings.

After the last of the dogs passed away, the cats, for a brief time, stopped drinking enough water; bad for cats who need the water for proper kidney function.

It did not take long to work out that they wanted to continue using the giant water bowls used by the two large dogs, rather than the dainty bowls we had put down.

The biggest change, however, as they age is the amount of time they want to spend with us humans.

In her youth, Jade would be off, out round the village all day and sleep in a cupboard at night, never wanting anything from her humans other than two meals a day.

Amber, however, was perfectly happy pretending she was a dog, sleeping and playing with Bonnie Pomeranian or following Sassoon and Molly around like a slave.

Now, however, ginger Amber finds the nearest human and lays out by their feet, following them when they move, resettling when they stop - just like a dog.

Georgina Noyce is an equestrian judge

and has a menagerie of adopted

four-legged waifs and strays