One More Discovery for Cammie

Cammie keeps on surprising me. The weather here is very cold: with the wind-chill, the temperature fell to -31° (Celsius; though when it’s that cold, it doesn’t matter what rule one uses) a couple of nights ago. The cats of course have their fur coats, and I have three heating pads in cat-beds or towels for their added comfort. One is in the parlour, and Cammie enjoys it more and more. But at night, Kola is locked in the parlour to prevent any nocturnal attempts on his peace of mind by Tucker. The Floof King uses the heating pad then.

Except for that, Cammie hasn’t used cat-beds much. But on the weekend, I found my Siamese princess comfortably curled up in one of the heated beds in the sitting room. I’m glad it wasn’t the one Tungsten habitually uses. I don’t need the orange one having another excuse to dislike her roommate.

Cammie’s expression is, unfortunately, always that combination of melancholy and misery that you see here. Despite that, I think she was enjoying herself, because soon, she was snoozing away the day.

It’s fun to watch a cat learn and discover. Just when I think they get into a habit, they change it. Now that Cammie has  found that this bed gives off warmth, she will remember it and, though she may not always use it, it will be there for her when she wants it. And with cats, that’s the most we can provide for them.

Josie the Less

Once again, it seems, Josie isn’t getting much coverage in my blog. She’s too unassuming, too diffident for her own good. It’s not that the Great White doesn’t cause her share of trouble. She will take every opportunity to get at Tungsten’s food bowl, which contains tastier, though not better, hard-food than her own. She will sometimes swat at Kola - though at least once recently, I have seen the Floof King actually chase Josie up the stairs from the basement, so maybe that relationship is evening out. But by and large, she doesn’t do much to get herself noticed - at least while I have my camera handy.

Though here she is doing what I like to call the ‘eye/ball’.

But the real reason for my Chubs’s appearance today is to announce that she has lost weight. Josie is half a pound lighter now than she was six months ago. She is still hefty (7.04 kilograms) but not as  weighty as she was in June (7.25 kilograms). I attribute this leavening to the soft-food I feed her. It is Merrick brand and, unlike most good food, my beasts seem to enjoy it, and have for some time. Josie in particular looks forward to soft-food meal-times. I buy five flavours regularly, the five that are popular in my house, so that variety is maintained. Josie will eat all five, and a good-sized portion at each serving. Now that I think of it, I have not seen her at the hard-food bowls as often as was the case. I would like to reduce the amount of hard-food served still further, but the reasons I can go only so far in that direction need another story. For now, I don’t want to detract from the Great White’s achievement.

Who knows? In time, I may have to stop calling Josie my Chubs...

The Mystery of the Mice

A mystery has come to my house recently. It involves the fuzzy mice that constitute the large portion of my cats’ toys. Everyone has or has had (before they were lost forever under couches, dressers and beds) the small fuzzy mice for cats to play with; they perform yeoman service in our household, scattered about the floors for the cats to attack and knock about whenever they feel like it.

Lately, they have been coming to the bedroom while I sleep.

This does not unnerve me, for two reasons. One, I know these toys are benign and mean no one harm. Two, I don’t believe they are moving of their own accord. Each morning for the past two weeks or so, I have woken to find at least a single, often two, sometimes three, fuzzy mice on the floor of the bedroom.

It has been different mice each time, or at least not the same ones, and they are not always left in the same location. In fact, one found its way onto the saddle of the taller cat-tree in the bedroom.

This narrowed the range of suspects in the case considerably. Renn enjoys snoozing in that spot during the day, but never at night, when he is comfortably curled up on the bed. Quite often, at least in the late hours of the night (as opposed to the early hours of the morning), the saddle is occupied by Cammie, who rests there after a full day of annoying Tungsten, telling the others to keep their distances and generally exerting her personality. She will lie in the saddle and look out into the dark and contemplate existence, alternate possibilities, time travel and such. Or whether to go and eat something. But only she uses the taller cat-tree after bed-time.

But if the mystery of who brings the mice to the bedroom is, to my satisfaction, solved, the question remains as to why she does it. She does not bat them about the house until they end up there; I would hear that and wake. No, she evidently carries them in her mouth, or perhaps slides them in with so little violence that the movements are silent. Is she bringing toys to keep her company during her nocturnal vigils? Are they trophies? Are they little furry things to care for?

It’s one of the riddles that will remain unsolved until that day when all riddles are answered. And it may not be the least important riddle to be answered then.

Crushing Tucker's Head

I have described the game Tungsten and I play. Now I will write about something Tucker and I do. I call it ‘Crushing Tucker’s Head’.

Tucker will periodically come up to me and rubbed his tubby body against my leg. Sometimes he’s saying ‘I like you.’ Other times, he’s saying, ‘I like you; play with me.’ On those occasions, I will chase him into the sitting room, where he will throw himself full-length on the rug, stretch and squeal as I grab his head. Then I pretend to crush that big melon. (Actually, I just rub his furry noodle, and he pretends I’m crushing it.) He squeals and reaches up to grab my hand, so he can drag it down to bite it. He has the proportions of a human infant, however; his stubby little forelegs are short, and have trouble seizing my hand. Once in a while he is able to pull it away and successfully nip it. This surprises both of us, and he pauses, worried that he’s done something wrong. (Tucker is about as violent as a Quaker.) I usually answer that query by doubling my efforts to crush that softball-sized noggin, and we’re off again.

Kola's Chance

The Lethbridge PAW Society, the rescue-group of which I am part, received an inquiry about Kola a couple of weeks ago. I am fostering that floofy mancat in the hopes that someone will choose him to live with forever, and this call was the sort of thing we wait for. However, the woman interested in Kola lives in Seattle, in the United States. That’s not a bad thing, but it does involve distance.

I am wary of any long-distance adoption now, following the unfortunate and abortive adoption of Cammie, earlier this year. The trouble with distances and adoptions is that if something goes wrong and the person wants to return the cat, that person may not consider the distance to travel worth the trouble; the cat may be handed off to someone else or put in a shelter. If faced with a returned cat, the PAW Society will do anything to make certain the cat comes back to it, rather than go elsewhere.

Even with these dangers, a long-distance adoption isn’t always a problem. Many of the rescuers whose blogs I read have had happy experiences, giving homeless cats wonderful families who live far away. Indeed, the PAW Society has, as it was pointed out to me, had cats adopted by people who then moved to distant locations. And certainly, Kola is one cat who has almost nothing that could initiate misgivings in a new adopter. His hygiene is excellent, he is not a fussy eater, he is friendly and playful, and has no trouble with other cats.

So what was my concern?

The person interested in Kola was very specific about what she wanted in a cat. Again, this is rarely a problem. Everyone who has adopted a cat has had certain qualities they would like to find in a new pet, though many of us are willing to forego most of them, especially when we find what an appealing little beast we’ve ended up with. There is nothing wrong with wanting particular qualities in a cat. After all, a person will be, hopefully, living with that cat for the rest of its life.

But the specificity of this person’s requests, combined with the distance, gave me some anxiety. I worried that if a person were exacting in what she wanted in a cat, she would be exacting in its fulfillment of her expectations. While a cat - or dog or person, or car or home - may check off all the boxes on a list, the situation may evolve differently in person. And when Kola was in person in Seattle, he would be hundreds of miles from everyone he knew.

The rescue-group shared my concerns yet, like me, they wanted the Floof King to have his chance. If his destiny lie half-way around the world, then he should go half-way around the world. But the worries remained, thanks to the memory of Cammie’s unhappy sojourn in Regina. As it turned out, Kola did not have one of the qualities that his prospective new person wanted. He is not a lap-cat; not yet, anyway. He is friendly and hurries over to urge me to pet him. He enjoys attention and seeks it out. He lies beside me to receive it. But he is not a lap-cat. He may be some day, perhaps soon. When he first came to stay with me, he didn’t like lying next to me. And with a different person, he may be on a lap immediately. Who can say? But the woman in Seattle wanted that characteristic right away.

What if Kola were a lap-cat yet, when he arrived at his new home, he would have nothing to do with laps? Cats are like that. Would he have been unwanted as quickly as the woman unwanted him when she heard by telephone that he didn’t care for laps?

So Kola remains with me in foster-care for the time being. But he is a very adoptable cat, and even long-distance homes are not out of the question with this furry boy. All he needs is someone who realises that the cat they get may surprise them with qualities that will make them laugh and smile, grind their teeth, keep them up at night, boast to their friends, shake their heads… In other words, all the things one gets from a member of one’s family.

Wherever

Most cats like warmth, which I find strange, considering that their body temperature is on average higher than ours and they are covered in fur, sometimes thick fur. Yet they enjoy lying in the sun on a hot summer’s day (which doesn’t preclude them later trying to find shade or a spot of cool floor on which to relax) and they like heating pads.

I have two beds in which heating pads have been inserted, and, in the parlour, several folded towels under which a third pad has been placed, for the comfort of my foster-cat, Kola, who spends much of his time in the parlour. But Cammie, who has not discovered or for some reason dislikes the heated beds in the sitting room, has found the heated towels to her liking.

Every week, before movie-night on Saturdays, I vacuum the couch in the parlour. I take the heated towels off, and set them aside. This last weekend, Cammie came in while I was cleaning and, evidently seeking a little warmth on a chilly night, looked for the heated towels. I had placed them on a round side-table. The fact that they were not in their usual spot did not deter the Siamese Princess. She knows nothing of electricity; to her, the towels are warm because they are the towels - wherever they may be.

The towels were displaced only briefly, and soon, Cammie was back on the towels, which were back on the couch. This simply goes to show that when a cat wants something, she will find it, wherever.

Strange Bowl-fellows

A month ago, I published pictures of Renn and Tucker eating almost together from the hard-food bowls, an unusual event. A week ago, I was able to record this occurrence, even more unusual. The cats’ dinner is usually about three-thirty on my days off, and an hour later when I work; their snack-time is approximately three hours subsequent, and the hard-food bowls are made available once more about nine or nine-thirty at night. That means the beasts receive only a ration of soft-food (though it is as much as they want) in five or six hours. This plan to encourage more soft-food consumption is working; the cats are ravenous come snack-time, and there is a happy and somewhat disgusting sound of six animals eating when I put down the stinky goodness on the floor. (Well, it’s in dishes, which go on the floor; the beasts themselves often toss it about the linoleum.) Nonetheless, they are hungry when the hard-food is presented once more.

How hungry? Enough for Josie and Cammie to eat this close. Cammie dislikes Josie. I believe this stems from a fight many months ago which may have pitted my Chubs against the Siamese Princess. Despite her lean and athletic form, and her claws which grow too sharp too fast, Cammie was easily worsted. The damage was not serious, and has not been repeated, thankfully. But the animosity on the victim’s side has lasted. Josie dislikes Cammie, too, I am afraid, though not to the extent felt by the other for her. They trade non-connecting blows from time to time, and Josie passes much too close now and then to Cammie for the latter’s comfort.

And yet, hunger can make cats do astonishing things. The images you see below are like a lion and a gazelle coming to drink from the same water-hole at dusk; a truce forms spontaneously, as they realise that they both need water to survive. Here, however, you have two lionesses: the older, heftier veteran, already a champion of one battle, and the leaner, younger comparative newcomer, wary and watchful, who puts on a fearsome show, but is really not a fighter.

Night falls in the jungle, and the scenes of would-be battle are covered with the sounds of eating. But notice how they keep an eye on each other, even as they chew…