In a house with a ton of cats, something is always going amiss. I have Shachori who barely lets me touch her and yowls, regularly, with the timber and piercing shrillness of an air raid siren. Other than that though, she is mostly an invisible part of the household. Mitzi is present but sedentary, old, and of a don’t even try to touch me or I’ll run and hide for hours demeanor. In other words, except for consuming food, you’d never notice she was here. Baby Muffin is extremely quiet as well and amuses herself mostly by herself –she is not of the rambunctious kitten variety but very dainty and what would be called in old-fashioned terms, “ladylike.” Tzofia, Tzeekada, and Mischa are generally also in the laid-back, barely noticeable category.
My rambunctious crew are Gingi, Arie, Batya, and Tinoket and they tend to cause the most problems in the household. Gingi has been cleared of one kind of criminal cat conduct. He’s been extremely “needy” since Muffin joined the household and a bit neurotic. I was convinced he was the cat who pees where a cat should not pee (e.g., on my pillow once, several times on the sofa). So convinced was I that I put him on kitty prozac. Several days ago, however, I discovered he is innocent of that particular crime. I was sitting on the sofa and then went to take a shower. I noticed that Gingi was all prozac’d-out in a kitty bed in my bedroom before I showered. After showering I came back out and sat in the same spot I’d recently vacated –only to discover that EEuuuwwwww. Yeah, someone had struck. But Gingi was still in prozac bliss in the same spot. He hadn’t even twitched a tail. So I’ve taken him off the prozac and have a new list of potential criminals. Sadly, the list is rather, uh, large.
But sans prozac, he has gone back to one of his bad behaviors —eating the keys off my laptop keyboard. Well, he doesn’t actually eat them but he does bite them off with a sharp-toothed accurate aim and can completely dislodge and toss into the air 3 or 4 of them in the space of about 5 seconds! But I finally won a major victory against him and even surprised myself with my success. Last night just before I went to sleep for my brief 3 hours of repast I left the computer on and open as I went to put away my tea cup in the sink. On returning after that brief moment away, I saw Gingi at the keyboard and new instantly what it meant. Indeed, he looked up at me as I approached with the \ key in his teeth. “Sppchheekkkkhheeeee” was the sound I made and very loud, sounding something like the TV when it suddenly loses its signal and goes to that crackly static-y sound. He leaped away and across the room with the key still in his mouth but as I continued to make the sound at him he ran back and deposited the key back on the keyboard! He literally dropped it right on top of the spot he’d taken it from. And then he ran out of the room. It had to be just dumb luck that he dropped it back almost exactly where it belonged but still …Thud –and double thud that he brought it back at all. It took just a bit of pushing and prodding and the key went right back into place. Hey, I’ll take my victories over the cats where I can and crow about them.
Now if I could just figure out who is the real prozac candidate…
Put them all on Prozac and take a few yourself
To distract cats you could use oil of catnip.
Hey thanks Mongrel, I’ll try it
They definitely need some distracting before they drive me to distraction!