Cooper, our 18-pound, 13-year-old orange cat has a new name.

Most of the 15 cats Amy and I have parented over our 49 years of marriage had multiple names and backstories, including Cooper.

“The Buffalo” is the name that fits him best now. It’s not just his shape – broad shoulders on a body that tapers in his hind quarters, if you ignore the sagging stomach.

His fur was the real inspiration for the name because, like a buffalo’s, his coat appears to be molting as he ages.

Cooper came to us in 2011 as a kitten. We’d just purchased a Mini Cooper at the time, hence the name.

Along with a brother, Cooper was rescued by a good Samaritan from a downtown parking garage and deposited at our vet’s office. His brother, Doc, was the shop cat at the vet’s office, until he started opening expensive bags of cat food at night.

One of Amy’s workmates, a fellow animal lover, thought the little orange ball of fur might be a good playmate for Alex, an elder Persian cat we inherited from Amy’s mother.

About 6 weeks old, Cooper was a bit of a mess with weepy eyes, ear mites, diarrhea and a nearly hairless tail. He had such a bad respiratory infection that when he purred, he’d start coughing.

Alex was not fond of Cooper, but Amy and I were charmed by his kittenish antics. It had been years since we’d had a real kitten, and we’d forgotten how entertaining it is to watch them dive into grocery bags, chase laser beams, wrestle catnip toys or leap sideways with an arched back when startled.

Alex was an indoor cat, but Cooper spent a lot of time on or under our deck or in the backyard, where he made friends with the local wildlife, which included chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons and possums.

Before Cooper arrived, our deck was home to two female feral cats. The girls refused to come in, so, after having them spayed, I built a two-story kitty condo on the deck.

We fed them on the deck, which attracted raccoons, possums and other varmints. Some nights when we were watching TV, we’d hear squealing and scrambling and look out to find a pack of teenage raccoons in a food fight.

When the feral cats reached Social Security age, we lured them inside and took down the kitty condo, which mostly solved our too-much wildlife problem.

I say mostly, because a possum later died under the deck. The odor was our first clue. I traced the smell to an area deep under the deck where the remains were in a nearly unreachable location.

To remove the possum, I taped a long pole onto the handle of a garden rake and pushed the rake under the deck in the direction of the odor. Gradually, I was able to roll out pieces of the deceased and dispose of them.

I asked a clerk at the hardware store what he suggested for the lingering odor.

“On the farm,” he said, “we just sprinkle lye on the dead pile.”

We bought some lye-like product, and with a leaf blower, I blew it under the deck in the direction of the problem. After a week or so, no more odor.

Which brings me back to Cooper.

When he started to lose patches of fur and molt, the vet said it was probably an allergy or something he was exposed to outside.

Cooper received shots and ointment, but the thing that worked best was the new cat we got last year, a female tabby rescued from a colony of feral cats. (Kudos to Whiskers TNR of Warren County.)

By the time we got Sybil Rose, or Scribble, as we call her, she was, as Huck Finn might say, “civilized.”

I don’t know what her job was in the cat colony, but as soon as she arrived, she started licking Cooper’s rough patches, which are now mostly healed.

His main problem now is arthritis, which makes him look even more like a lumbering buffalo when he walks.