| Rebo & Zooty |
[Nov. 18th, 2007|04:20 pm] |
So everyone's been asking: how are the cats? Are they happy? What are they like? Tell us everything!* So here's the news.
Rebo is easy. She mostly lies on the couch or the chair in the corner, with brief bouts of lying around somewhere else; the lid of a cardboard box has become a favorite ever since we put a little catnip in it once. (She does love the 'nip.) She's a little skittish when let out of the living room; she tends to see someone walking and run for her life back to familiar ground. But she's also happily exploring, poking around in the bedroom even though that's Zooty Territory.
She's extremely good-natured, and is quite fond of petting, as well as lying on keyboards. She came to us declawed, which (a) is terrible, especially given that she was found as a stray, and (b) suggests that she's had a little more experience being used to humans. It also means that clawing isn't a behavior problem, and while I hate declawing and would never do it to a cat, I must admit it's kind of a relief to have one less thing to worry about with her. Generally, though, there's little to worry about. She eats well, she plays well, she sleeps a lot, she purrs. She squeals a little when picked up and cuddled in arms, but she has grown accustomed to laps. Foodwise, she's pretty easygoing; she didn't complain at all about the switch from shelter-provided kitten food to adult cat food; she didn't like the hard tuna treats, but the moist chicken and moist seafood went over well. She does have a tendency to eat from the floor instead of her bowl—that is, she'll scoop a piece of food out of the bowl and then eat it—but that's fairly endearing.
She's also a mighty huntress; more than once, she's spontaneously pounced on a toy mouse, batted it around, caught it in her mouth, and meowed triumphantly. And if my students showed half the energy on the homework that she shows in the chasing and capturing of glitterpoms, I'd cancel the final and give them all A's. Her favorite interactive game, though, is "soccer goalie". It involves either a toy mouse or a foil ball; she'll lie there and watch it, but won't get up until you toss it right in front of her, at which point she'll bat it away and wait. No chasing, just waiting for it to come and batting it away. (If only we had a dog who could fetch, the two of them would be like a perpetual motion machine of animal cuteness.)
Zooty is more of a problem case. Among the things she likes: biting, high places, more biting, dragging her water bowl around. (Michelle suspects she prefers water in motion to still water, which is why she pushes it before drinking from it. On our list of things to get: a fountain.) She's athletic; leaping and climbing are not problems. Last night, I looked up to see that she had leapt up to the shoulders of my hanging shirts, balancing herself on the hangers there while pulling herself up to the storage shelf at the top of the closet. That's since been closed, and she has to content herself with the bed, the back of the couch, and the cat tree on top of my dresser. When sleeping in bed with us, she tends to climb up on whichever of us is on our side, that being a higher point than someone's back. Shoulders of people sitting have also proved popular. Today she's discovered a new perch as well, though when she sits on them it does make it hard for Michelle to see her computer. Like Rebo, she's fond of removing food from her bowl, though in her case that means scooping out an entire pawful and then eating them one at a time. Or sometimes scooping out a pawful, eating one piece, and scooping out another pawful. And at least once, scooping out a pawful and then eating from the bowl.
There are, conversely, a lot of things she doesn't like. High on the list is being held while a dropperful of antibiotic is forceably fed to her; I've got the scratch marks to prove that one, and additional evidence can be seen in the way her face is streaked with pink medicine that escaped her mouth while she squirmed. (Related to the antibiotics, she's not fond of having her nose wiped with a tissue. It's easier to wait for her to sneeze, and then wipe everything else in a one-foot radius.) We'd like to reward her for good behavior, like holding still while we medicate her, but that's another point where finding things she likes has proved difficult. We've tried hard tuna treats, moist chicken treats, moist seafood treats, canned tuna cat food, rendered chicken fat, boiled chicken, smoked turkey, goat cheese, cream cheese...nothing. Rebo came in and ate the tuna after she abandoned it (she did paw a little of it onto the floor first). I put the piece of turkey in her bowl; she pulled it out, pushed it away, and went back to the food in her bowl. Similarly with the cream cheese, which Michelle put on a piece of her cat food—she just decided to push that piece of cat food away.
Fortunately, they've pretty much learned to coexist; there's some mistrust, but they can walk past each other civilly, and have no problem being in the same room within sight of each other. This bodes well for the future.
*Actually, no one's been asking. But even a few weeks of cat ownership have taught me Garner's First Law of Modern Cat Ownership: Blog about your cats even if no one particularly cares. |
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