The Amazing Life of Cats (7 page)
‘Sorry,’ I told her. ‘I really need to prepare the evening meal.’
She communicated to me that she was happy with this turn of events: ‘I shall just smell the roses in the garden for a few minutes,’ she told me silently, walking majestically through the front door.
For a while I watched her tail moving between the flowerbeds, then went to the kitchen and began preparing the evening meal; all at once, I was startled by the screech of car tyres.
Somehow I instantly knew that it was Mrs Cat. I ran out the door as fast as I could, but before I could even open the gate she had jumped over the two-metre-high garden wall and landed by my feet with a frightening thud. She looked up at me.
Her eyes glowed: ‘Me and you . . .’ she seemed to say.
The light in her eyes gradually dimmed; her head sank back gently, then fell, touching my foot, as a last intimate token of our bond.
I have never forgotten Mrs Cat.
Celia Novy
P
ercy was a venerable moggy—twenty-three years old to be exact, by which time he was almost blind and totally deaf. He spent his days sitting on the top step in the sun waiting for something, anything, to turn up.
To call him in for meals, my friend who owned him would tell her huge border collie, ‘Call Percy!’ Whereupon the dog would wander out to where Percy was sitting, bend down and bark very loudly in his ear. At this sudden assault on his eardrums, Percy would shake his head a little, stagger to his paws and wobble his way into the kitchen, for all the world like a geriatric on a Zimmer frame.
Vashti Farrer
French novelist Colette was a firm
cat lover. Once when she was visiting
America she saw a cat sitting in the
street. She went over to talk to it and
the two of them mewed at each other
for a friendly minute. Colette turned
to her companion and exclaimed,
‘Enfin! Quelqu’un qui parle français.’
(At last! Someone who speaks French!)
Chalk and Cheese—Only
a Mother Could Love Them
I
f you know anything at all about cats, you will know that not only do they come in all shapes, sizes, colours, markings and temperaments but also that opting for your breed of choice is no guarantee that you will get a cat blessed with the personality traits and characteristics usually ascribed to that breed. Nature is rarely so obliging and there is no such thing as ‘catalogue’ selection. Take Kevin and Smokey Puss: both blue Persians, but there the resemblance ends.
Everyone laughs at Kevin’s name, but my sister June, who owns and loves them both, says she had to call him that ‘because he never really looked like anything, if you see what I mean’. What he does look, in fact, is absolutely beautiful; the real Persian Prince Charming, except charming is the one thing he is not. Kev hates people. He is the personification of the saying, ‘Dogs have masters, cats have staff.’ He purrs loudly when let in after a hard day’s work keeping the mouse population in check at Moor Farm, but it is a purring akin to Her Majesty thanking the maid as she clears away the tea things or the chauffeur for returning her safely to the palace: a royal condescension rather than a friendly welcome. Kevin has the most stunning coat and beautiful orange eyes but he is shy and unfriendly, preferring to keep his distance. Unfortunately, his aloofness also extends to Smokey Puss, so named for the soft, misty colour of her fur; June hoped to breed from them but Kevin was simply not interested and refused to oblige.
What Smokey missed out on in the looks department—even June describes her as ‘so ugly’—she more than makes up for in personality. She loves to be stroked, kissed, turned upside down, played with and cuddled, and is the sort of cat who would revel in being dressed up and wheeled down the lane in a doll’s pram.
Kevin and Smokey Puss are not the only cats to have graced June’s life. First came Tinks, a flea-ridden feral kitten rescued from a ditch in Cyprus. Tinks is the only cat I have ever seen who literally bounced and frolicked like a puppy, the bell on her collar tinkling merrily as she welcomed June home from work.
Then came Lucie Pish, an absolute princess: a fluffy white Persian with deep blue eyes and blue markings on her face and paws, the most beautiful cat June has ever seen. Although Lucie carefully chose whom to love and when to associate with people, she knew how to comfort. After our beloved mum died, Lucie would drape herself consolingly over the back of the couch, offering solace in the only way she knew how, while June wept. Lucie could be volatile and capricious but knew how to care when it counted.
Finally, there was Sammy, who just wanted to be loved. He had the body of an ordinary moggie and was descended from a black and white cat probably not unlike Postman Pat’s Jess, but he must also have had more aristocratic history in his genes, as he managed to acquire the markings of a Siamese. Sam Cat thought people were there to be loved and to love him, which is probably why they usually did.
June cannot imagine a house without cats, which can only mean this unpredictable procession is likely to continue. Perhaps that is half the fun: adopting new felines and watching to see what personality will emerge once they begin to grow up.
Elaine Harris
The purity of a person’s heart can
be quickly measured by how they
regard cats.
Anonymous
G
izmo and his brother Loki arrived in Edinburgh in the summer of 2005, having travelled from a farm in Inverness. The two particularly furry kittens settled well into life in the city and we saw them at our Cat Clinic in Bellevue for all the typical kitten events— vaccination, neutering and worming.
The following year we saw both cats for their annual health check and booster vaccination and they were given a clean bill of health. Some days later, however, Gizmo was not quite his usual self. The owners had come home from work to find a few piles of vomit and a slightly quiet cat. Gizmo, like most cats, had occasionally vomited fur balls so at the vet’s we weren’t unduly alarmed by this event.
However, by the next morning it was clear that all was not well with Gizmo and he was brought back to our clinic. Far from the bright bouncy young cat we last saw, in came a very quiet, subdued little soul who had been retching most of the night. On examination, his heart, lungs, membranes and temperature were all normal but when his abdomen was palpated something wasn’t quite right. Our vet could feel a sausage-like swelling in his intestines and suspected that there was some form of blockage.
Occasionally growths in the abdomen can cause this but they generally don’t bring on such sudden and dramatic changes. What else could it be? The vet wondered if it might be an intussusception, a condition where the gut telescopes in on itself, like pulling a sock inside out, but it didn’t quite feel thick enough for that. Could it be a foreign body? Possible, but cats tend to be a bit more sensible about swallowing daft objects than dogs (apart from stringy things, the cat speciality). Whatever the swelling was, it looked like it was at the root of the problem with Gizmo so further investigation was needed.
Gizmo was admitted to our main clinic and the first step was to give him a sedative to allow us to palpate his abdomen more thoroughly. Another of our vets had a feel and agreed there was something not quite right. An x-ray was taken. Foreign bodies often show up as distinct shapes and densities on x-rays but we could see no obvious change in the area of the swelling. What we did see was a loop of gas in the intestines which suggested that whatever was causing the swelling was definitely causing a blockage. There was only one thing to do. We had to have a look inside.
Gizmo was given a general anaesthetic; once he was fast asleep we clipped the fur on his abdomen and prepared the skin for surgery. An incision was made through his skin and muscle and the abdomen was opened. The initial impression was that everything looked pretty healthy but we started working our way along the segment of intestines. Again everything was looking nice and healthy until we reached an area where the intestines were just a bit more pink than normal. We moved along a few more centimetres and the intestines became pinker again. A few more centimetres further on we encountered a reddened angry area and could clearly see that this section of the intestines was distended: there was a sausage-shaped object stuck inside there.
The next step was to look inside the intestines. A small incision was made and we immediately saw an abnormal dark colour lurking inside. This wasn’t part of the body or something growing in the wall of the intestines—this was an object within the intestines which shouldn’t have been there. A gentle pull with forceps showed there was some movement but a larger incision was required to fully remove the object. It was grabbed at one end and very gently squeezed out of the incision. Out came a black sausage and all the attendant staff stared at the object on the swab. In unison we cried, ‘A fur ball!’
We’d heard of vets having to surgically remove fur balls from cats but this was a first in the eleven years of the Cat Clinic. Most fur balls are vomited up or pass naturally through the body to be expelled in the normal fashion but this one was a cracker and there was no chance it was going to move in either of the ways that nature intended!