As I sit here at the computer, the cat is meowing at my feet. He should be dead by now. He should have died many times already.
This cat has ruled our household for over 15 years and he is not about to stop. He still jumps on the table to steal pencils when we are writing or push the dice off to the floor if we are playing. When I come down in the morning I find muddy paw prints on the stove top.
He is an ordinary looking cat: gray and white, green eyes, a long tail, yet he seems to think he is part of the dog family. He walks along with the dog every night and sits on the sidewalk waiting while his “brother” relieves himself.
Since cat food is obviously yummier than the dog kind they have devised a system to allow the dog to eat some of that forbidden food. Here is how they do it. The cat asks for food, by meowing or nibbling at my feet.. I put his dish on the floor. He sniffs it, might take a bite or two and then walks away quietly. This is the signal for the dog to quickly go to the cat food dish and gobble it down before I have time to stop him. And it works! I do not have the time or patience to stand by watching the cat fiddle with his food. They do this several times a day. Often the dog is not even in the room, yet he knows when it is his turn. I know the cat does this in part to get me to open a new can of food. He likes fresh and varied food obviously, but I suspect a certain complicity between them.
When he was younger we used to take him with us every weekend to the cabin, but he hated the car and would cry and growl and make such a racket that we ended up feeding him Valium to keep him quiet. When we would let him out of his cage he would stagger like a drunk for a few hours until the effect wore off. When it was time to head back to the city he would hide. Many times, after loading the car, dressing the kids, turning down the heat, shutting off the water, turning off the lights I had to get back in the house turn on the stove and cook some bacon to entice him back. We discovered that his favorite hiding place was in the unfinished part under the house so we got that fenced off. But he would still try to run away whenever he expected a car ride. A couple of times we had to leave without him and then drive back up the next day to retrieve him.
During the ice storm we lost him for several weeks. We had brought him with us when we went to live with friends. He escaped the house and it seems he hid in a nearby shed feeding on bird seeds until our friend saw him walking through her garden. We now know that as dogs are attached to their masters, cats are attached to the house they live in. So we had a special trap door installed for him and he can now come and go as he pleases and we no longer take him with us when we leave.
Did you know that cats have a very elaborate social system? Within a neighborhood, there are public cat ways and semi public ones and finally private ones? This is all in relationship to the house each cat lives in. Usually the backs of the gardens are public throughways for all cats to use. There are paths through the gardens that “only friends” are allowed to use and finally close to the house, on the steps or the balconies is the private domain of the resident cat. This is the usual way but at times a dominant cat might capture a weaker cat’s territory. That is why cat fights occur. Our cat always was a strong tom cat, a fighter, but he lost one battle that cost him dearly. This fight was not with a rival. From what we were able to reconstruct he got in a fight with a raccoon and lost. He was very badly hurt. His shoulder was ripped open to the bone. He managed to drag himself back home and we rushed him to the veterinarian. He was saved but spent a long time confined inside. When an animal has a wound he will try to lick it and rip out the stitches so the vet puts a plastic collar (funnel like contraption) around his neck to prevent him to reach the wound. This was too big to allow the cat to pass through bushes or fences so we had to keep him inside until he was healed. The word spread through the feline grapevine and very soon our cat’s territory was subject to a hostile take over. When the collar was finally removed we let him out and no sooner was he free that he got in a fight and hurt his paw. Back to the vet. This time he came back with a cute little bootie. He had to be kept in again . When he was finally ready to be let out again we gave him a bit of a hand by spraying with the garden hose any cat who seemed to be hovering a bit too close to the house.. Things got back to normal after a time and he now reigns over his domain unchallenged…both inside and out!