Thursday, September 01, 2005

"Leave My Kitten All Alone"

So Wen took one of our cats, Pirate, to the Virginia/North Carolina border today. She's meeting up with some woman she's been corresponding with online to give the woman Pirate, 'cause we really just can't keep him. He pukes all the time. We can't deal with that (though he's been real good for the past week).

The big problem is that Pirate needs a different environment than what he has here. He'd do better in a single-cat environment where he can have special food and such. I mean, he's an old cat (10 years thus far), and though he plays with Obe and can usually hold his own, it was very obvious that Obe was the alpha male here. I mean, he would wash Pirate. Most cats won't stand some other cat washing them, but (I think) Obe did it to show he was in charge and so that Pirate smelled like him (after all, a cat's saliva contains chemicals that they use to mark their territory...I mean, you notice how cats always rub up against stuff? Well, since they bathe themselves with their tongues, it means their fur is actually covered in those chemicals, so rubbing against something serves the purpose of marking territory with those chemicals. Now, the only question is why I know all of this crap).

So yeah, Pirate is gone, now. Wen will come back this evening with another cat, Jasmine, who is the same breed as Obe (a Bengal) and much younger than Pirate. The hope is that Miss Jasmine will be able to finally put Obe in his place.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I've got the apartment to myself all day, and a pile of laundry taller than a small child to wash. Hurray.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, "Magnolia Mountain"

4 comments:

Noise Monkey said...

You know too much about cats. It's frightening, really.

Anonymous said...

So the cat threw up because he was being dominated by another cat? Interesting.

Mel

Chuck Cottrell said...

Yes, Monkey, entirely too much.

And no, Mel, we think the cat was throwing up because he would eat too much food at once or he would eat tape (when he could find it on, say, a box, he'd go to town).

Regardless, we have a new cat now named Jasmine, and she's quite amiable if still a little unused to her new surroundings (hey, she's been here a matter of hours so far).

Noise Monkey said...

cats are all, by nature, stoned, anyway.