Tales of an extremely confused cat
Everyone has cat anecdotes, so I might as well get them out of the way
now (we'll do the dog anecdotes later). Now, back when I was in high
school, my family acquired first a dog, and then, several years later,
a cat. Much confusion was had at first when we were trying to figure
out how the dog would react to the cat (kitten, at this point, of course),
but this mainly seemed to consist of bouncing around and getting very
excited, which seemed to make the kitten a tadge surly, mainly because
the reason the dog was bouncing was in an attempt to get at said kitten.
Eventually, however, it was discovered that the dog wasn't actually keen
on eating the kitten, as we had first suspected, but on getting
a good whiff. This accomplished, things became much calmer.
It helped, I suppose, that the dog in question was a fairly mellow animal,
and had also been through the indignity of having puppies (purebred
puppies, of course, which meant that it was easy to foist the little buggers
off on people). So the dog's apparent mental reaction to said kitten was
"Hmm. Small, fuzzy. In the house. I remember what that is."
This of course made the dog increasingly insistent on slurping the kitten
at any opportunity, which made the kitten increasingly irascible, however
it also meant that the dog was extremely tolerant of the cat skittering
around, batting at the dog's head and ears, pouncing it from concealed
ambush positions behind chairs... All of this the dog bore without complaint.
Being raised by the dog probably made the kitten a tadge bit bewildered, of
course, as the catty instincts of fastidiousness, superiority and chasing
anything small that moved into view conflicted with the dog's motherly
training in scattering food about the kitchen floor, rummaging in the
garbage and lounging about in people's paths to trip them whenever she was
neglected. Nevertheless, the kitten seemed to manage adequately, and
educated herself by reducing the local mole and lizard population (while we
could do without the moles, slaughtering all the poor lizards gave us a
hideous insect problem; the food chain is a mysterious and surly beast).
Even so, she did have a disturbing taste for the dog's food... Which even
the dog eventually got fed up with.
Another difficulty was that the dog was a fairly obedient animal (most
dogs usually are), but the cat did not at all pick this up. Both animals
eventually learned the signs that everyone was Going On A Trip and that
they were both about to be deposited at the vet. The dog's response was
to become depressed and needy, while the cat's response was to get out of
the house and refuse to return until after midnight, when it was safe to
assume nobody was goin' nowhere. There's a certain intelligence to that,
but it certainly didn't make for easy trip planning, since it was
necessary to nab the cat well before any other preparations could be made.
The dog and cat never needed to stick up for each other, as there were
rarely any intrusions from animals more dangerous than common lizards, but
on occasion one of the neighborhood dogs wandered in to share in the
canine ritual of the mutual butt-sniffing. Things were proceeding amiably
until the cat happened by and decided this would be a lovely time to display
her prowess in battle, and bounded (literally) down the drive towards the
offending pooch, making a noise vaguely like that of an anti-aircraft gun,
then skittered back when the pooch just stared in bafflement, only to
regain confidence when she wasn't pursued, and bound back down towards
the infidel. The two dogs stared in confusion as this continued for a bit.
Finally it registered in the intruder's brain that, hey, maybe that insane
black hairball would stop making such a fuss if he just left, and retreated
to more hospitable climes.
The cat, for her trouble, got slurped vigorously by the dog, and retreated
into the shrubberies to de-slobber herself.
There was a moral here somewhere, but quite frankly I've forgotten it.
Tomorrow: FoolProof My Eye.
Rant 'o the day contains no additives, preservatives or
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Handle with care. Contains less than 3% milk fat by weight, not by volume.
Squeeze the lemon.
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