There are innumerable lesser-known but perfectly legitimate reasons why sharing one’s warm and loving abode with a family of cats is a perfectly delightful exercise in sheer lunacy. The piercing sound of violent hairball upchucking comes to mind, followed by pitifully monotonous full-moon-kitty-moaning and out-of-the-blue-stinkeye-induced cat carnage – all of which invariably erupt at 3:47 in the morning.
Talk about species traits – the Felis catus is programmed to prowl your home (when all creatures great and small should rightfully be sleeping) in order to shake down your cupboards, hack on your leather couch and curl up on your placemats. If you have a brood of two or more, you can never quite figure out who the ring leader is…except when you have the rare advantage of witnessing the offense firsthand.
Allow me to illustrate my point. Just yesterday, I scooped my diabetic cat Cyrano up for jaunt to his grandparents house, where we were able to enjoy a longer visit than normal since I could administer his insulin ‘on the road’ rather than rushing all the way back home at 7:00 PM (his scheduled PM dose) and calling it a night.
We’ve been testing this new arrangement out every few weeks, and though sugar-cat seems agreeable, his companions don’t seem to be at all warm-and-fuzzy upon his return. As has happened on 4 occasions before, I witnessed my notoriously skittish cat Artemis briefly sniff Cyrano and then proceed to unleash the rage of a thousand locusts on him (while offering audio reenactments of back-to-back slasher-horror flicks). Really, I wish that I could somehow pimp that cat out for his uncanny vocalization skills, but back to the story at hand.
What to do, what to do? I realize that cats (and dogs, for that matter) are hyper-sensitive to foreign scents that rudely encroach upon their comfort zones. They can’t help but instinctually defend their territory, even if that means spitting fire at their life-long mate(s) who have merely re-entered their stomping grounds.
Eventually the foreign scent that has ‘infected’ their sibling dissipates and all order is restored to the universe, but I’ve noticed that it takes skitty-cat at least 36+ hours to get over it…and poor sugar-cat bears the brunt of a whole lotta undeserved wrath. This is where things get kinda cool.
In a brainstorm of massively cool proportions, I decided to nip things in the bud immediately by smothering the scent that freaked Artemis out with a familiar, comforting scent instead. I carried Cyrano with me into the laundry room, closed the door behind us for some much-needed-privacy, and then proceeded to rub him down with several pieces of clothing that were already destined for the washing machine .
Cyrano wasn’t shy about his delight, flopping over on his side and purring up a storm – and after swaddling and fluffing up his face and fur with my sweatpants from Friday night, bath towels that needed refreshing and a few shirts that had seen better days, I released him into the company of his pissy pussies. Yowza, what a resounding success!!! Not one curled lip, deep grumble or whacking paw in sight. In this case, dirty laundry really can be a blessing in disguise………….
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