Cats

Corporal snuggling works wonders on misbehaving kitties. It annoys them, and makes you feel better!

All our cats’ brains are abnormal. Martini’s brain is taken up mostly by the short circuit lobe and the “inability to get along with a new cat” area; Neko (like Leslie’s cat Bob) has an enlarged barf gland; and Loki’s obsessive compulsive disorder originates in the “total drive to be where they are forbidden to go” cortex.

All three of our cats are normally very fastidious with their bathroom habits. Loki and Neko never ever go outside the litterbox. However, Martini is a little pickier and she does not like using a box that one of the other two cats has recently used… and if it’s not to her liking, she poops on the rug instead. This is a little irritating but totally manageable. Poop is easy to pick up and get rid of, and a spritz of Lysol and a light scrub brushing over the area takes care of the problem. Pee, however, is another story. Only once before has Martini ever peed outside the litterbox, and that was about eight years ago when we switched the cat litter to the crystal style granules — which we loved but the cats hated, and Martini let us know in no uncertain terms by squatting on the rug next to the box while I was scooping it out and peeing right in front of me. Yes ma’am, message received, we’re switching back to clay litter. A few nights ago she decided again that she didn’t want to use the litterbox that one of her siblings had recently used, but this time instead of just pooping on the rug, she peed on a piece of plastic sheeting that we had accidentally left lying on the rug. Cardinal rule #1 for cat owners: Don’t ever leave plastic sheeting lying around; it is an irrestistible cat pee magnet. Oopsie. Luckily for us, the pee was contained within a little pool on the plastic and did not make its way to the rug. We were actually downstairs watching television at the time this happened, and only discovered it when Martini waltzed by and we caught the distinct odor of cat pee. It […]

Doc and I went to a cat show on Saturday. Our friends Michael and Jill have a Norwegian Forest Cat that they have begun entering in cat shows. I had a preconceived notion of what cat shows were like, and I was none too surprised to learn that it was being held at a convention hall tacked on to a Holiday Inn next to a rodeo arena in Mesquite. I imagined that it would be full of yowling, unhappy cats and their stage-mom-crazy owners who would give off a notable “white trash” vibe. Oh, and that the place would smell like a giant litterbox. I was right on the latter two counts, but surprisingly the unhappy meows were few and far between. Most of the cats had a glazed look in their eyes indicating that they’d long ago given up trying to fight this unnatural lifestyle of baths, back-combing for maximum fluff, eye makeup (I’m totally serious), and manhandling by strangers poking their fingers in their mouths and looking up their back ends. Michael and Jill were a notable exception to this, of course, and their cat (a kitten, actually, at 7 months) was very sweet and a bit frightened at times. When it was Ghali’s turn in the show cage, he was alert and attentive and talkative. I think he won at least one ribbon. We got an information sheet with our entrance fee, which explained in the Junior Showmanship section that “young people are important to the sport of pedigreed cats.” Wait, now: pedigreed cats are a sport? That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? I don’t remember having a Pedigreed Cats team at my high school or anything like that. Also, I find the names the people give their fancy purebred cats rather ridiculous. Coonunnski Teton Cody of […]