For the Love of Mog – A CATastrophic Tale - January 11, 2020
I had lunch with two amazing gal pals the other day. One has just moved into a place that has five ceiling fans. In Arizona, that is a mighty good thing. But apparently not if you are the owner of a cat who is phobic about ceiling fans – a cat who is hard-wired to see the ceiling fan as a predator coming to get it. Little Moggy (not the cat’s real name) decided to hide under the bed.
Now you and I might be content to just ignore the cat and let her come around on her own terms. And my friend and her spouse tried that, but Moggy was having none of it. Unless they could come up with a better option, Moggy was content to have her kitchen (food) and bathroom (litter box) under the bed. Her guardians were not so content.
So they created a tunnel for her - using chairs and blankets - so Moggy could leave the bedroom and get to a room that didn’t have a ceiling fan. No way was that gonna happen. What to do? Cats get entrenched in a behaviour very quickly and are resistant to changing it.
Moggy’s mom consulted Dr. Google Veterinarian for ideas. And what she and her hubs have come up with, is that they are going to take down all the fan blades from all five fans for now. And that will be well and good until the Arizonan summer heat hits.
Then, once Moggy is on the move again, they are going to paint each blade white or a neutral colour and put them back one at a time over a series of days, weeks, months.
If this sounds outlandish to you, you aren’t a cat aficionado.
*****
I was never in love with any one cat – OK, except maybe Minou and maybe Honey – and my deep love only revealed itself after they got hit by cars. (All of our cats have been indoor cats but there have been a few escape artists.)
But I was in love with Cat Rescue and that meant having many cats all sleeping under the same roof – our roof. And very often on our bed. But if either of us was so get any sleep at all, we needed the cats out of the bedroom at night. Cats – being nocturnal – can get a little rowdy when the sun goes down. (Actually, cats are crepuscular – meaning they like to hunt at dusk and dawn which is why – when we are hiking – I like to be back to the car by 4:30 pm.)
Anyhoo, at bedtime one of us would announce “It’s time to do a cat toss!” We didn’t really toss them. Laur would pick one up and hand it to me and I’d put it outside our door. We would try to count them ahead of time. Eight was the average number. So we’d number each cat as we de-bedded them. “One…two…three…etc.” And inevitably one would disappear under the bed and up into the mattress through a hole an earlier cat had put in the lining. Very hard to locate, let alone grab it – so you go to bed and hope for the best.
Which is in vain because long about 3 in the morning, “Pine 3” or “Hazelnut 2” – we named them after the road they were found on and in the order they were found in – would decide that he or she wanted to lie across my husband’s face or wanted out of the bedroom to go play with the others. And we’d hear “scritchy, scritchy, scratch.”
Hubs could handle that – he normally had to get up once in the night anyway so en route he’d scoop up “eight” and plant it firmly on the other side of our bedroom door.
What Laur couldn’t handle was the one cat – and there was always one – that wanted to come back in. “Scritchy, scritchy, scratch.” He’d leap out of bed and pound on the door … and sometimes just after he got back to sleep, it would happen again. “Scritchy, scritchy, scratch.”
One night hubs completely lost it. He opened the door to yell at “Main 4” or “Front 1” and tripped and fell into the railing. Our bedroom was on the top floor and there was a staircase and a landing leading up to it with a flimsy railing bordering it. Anyway, the railing fell down the stairs and Laur ended up straddling the staircase. Toes on the landing – hands on the opposite wall.
I got up when I heard what sounded like metal crashing down the stairs. It was. And there was my hubs at a 45 degree angle. I’m not sure how he managed to get back on the landing. I’m sure I was of no help. I got a fit of the giggles because he looked like the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon. Laur said sternly, “This isn’t funny!” and then once he got back on terra firma, he got a fit of the giggles too.
In time – lots of time – we replaced the fragile metal staircase railing with a solid wooden one. And my oh my – the cats sure loved to sharpen their claws on that.
*****
All good things must come to an end. I retired from cat rescue when Laur was getting close to retirement, we sold our house in Sudbury, moved into a cat-free bed and breakfast in St. Catharines (just for a year, while figuring out what to do next), and increased our Arizona time. Cat ownership is completely off the table for us now. Except when occasionally we foster a cat or two, or cat-sit our friend’s or our kids’ cats at our apartment.
We had been cat free for one year before moving into an apartment. At that time I took in two foster cats – Wallace and Willis. And what happened within a day of W & W arriving? Laurence got itchy watery eyes and started sneezing. Turns out Laur has a mild cat allergy. He likely always did – it’s just that he thought that having red eyes and a cough was normal.
And I guess it came to be normal when you have a cat allergy and your wifey is a cat rescuer. Note: None of our kids have cat allergies. And all of our kids have a cat or four – save for Elaine who lives in South Korea. She gets her fix at Cat Cafes which are all the rage in S. Korea.
In fact, she helped me set one up in Sudbury – Small Things Cat Café. The first one in Canada. https://www.sudbury.com/lifestyle/purrking-up-for-cat-cafe-230997
Now you and I might be content to just ignore the cat and let her come around on her own terms. And my friend and her spouse tried that, but Moggy was having none of it. Unless they could come up with a better option, Moggy was content to have her kitchen (food) and bathroom (litter box) under the bed. Her guardians were not so content.
So they created a tunnel for her - using chairs and blankets - so Moggy could leave the bedroom and get to a room that didn’t have a ceiling fan. No way was that gonna happen. What to do? Cats get entrenched in a behaviour very quickly and are resistant to changing it.
Moggy’s mom consulted Dr. Google Veterinarian for ideas. And what she and her hubs have come up with, is that they are going to take down all the fan blades from all five fans for now. And that will be well and good until the Arizonan summer heat hits.
Then, once Moggy is on the move again, they are going to paint each blade white or a neutral colour and put them back one at a time over a series of days, weeks, months.
If this sounds outlandish to you, you aren’t a cat aficionado.
*****
I was never in love with any one cat – OK, except maybe Minou and maybe Honey – and my deep love only revealed itself after they got hit by cars. (All of our cats have been indoor cats but there have been a few escape artists.)
But I was in love with Cat Rescue and that meant having many cats all sleeping under the same roof – our roof. And very often on our bed. But if either of us was so get any sleep at all, we needed the cats out of the bedroom at night. Cats – being nocturnal – can get a little rowdy when the sun goes down. (Actually, cats are crepuscular – meaning they like to hunt at dusk and dawn which is why – when we are hiking – I like to be back to the car by 4:30 pm.)
Anyhoo, at bedtime one of us would announce “It’s time to do a cat toss!” We didn’t really toss them. Laur would pick one up and hand it to me and I’d put it outside our door. We would try to count them ahead of time. Eight was the average number. So we’d number each cat as we de-bedded them. “One…two…three…etc.” And inevitably one would disappear under the bed and up into the mattress through a hole an earlier cat had put in the lining. Very hard to locate, let alone grab it – so you go to bed and hope for the best.
Which is in vain because long about 3 in the morning, “Pine 3” or “Hazelnut 2” – we named them after the road they were found on and in the order they were found in – would decide that he or she wanted to lie across my husband’s face or wanted out of the bedroom to go play with the others. And we’d hear “scritchy, scritchy, scratch.”
Hubs could handle that – he normally had to get up once in the night anyway so en route he’d scoop up “eight” and plant it firmly on the other side of our bedroom door.
What Laur couldn’t handle was the one cat – and there was always one – that wanted to come back in. “Scritchy, scritchy, scratch.” He’d leap out of bed and pound on the door … and sometimes just after he got back to sleep, it would happen again. “Scritchy, scritchy, scratch.”
One night hubs completely lost it. He opened the door to yell at “Main 4” or “Front 1” and tripped and fell into the railing. Our bedroom was on the top floor and there was a staircase and a landing leading up to it with a flimsy railing bordering it. Anyway, the railing fell down the stairs and Laur ended up straddling the staircase. Toes on the landing – hands on the opposite wall.
I got up when I heard what sounded like metal crashing down the stairs. It was. And there was my hubs at a 45 degree angle. I’m not sure how he managed to get back on the landing. I’m sure I was of no help. I got a fit of the giggles because he looked like the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon. Laur said sternly, “This isn’t funny!” and then once he got back on terra firma, he got a fit of the giggles too.
In time – lots of time – we replaced the fragile metal staircase railing with a solid wooden one. And my oh my – the cats sure loved to sharpen their claws on that.
*****
All good things must come to an end. I retired from cat rescue when Laur was getting close to retirement, we sold our house in Sudbury, moved into a cat-free bed and breakfast in St. Catharines (just for a year, while figuring out what to do next), and increased our Arizona time. Cat ownership is completely off the table for us now. Except when occasionally we foster a cat or two, or cat-sit our friend’s or our kids’ cats at our apartment.
We had been cat free for one year before moving into an apartment. At that time I took in two foster cats – Wallace and Willis. And what happened within a day of W & W arriving? Laurence got itchy watery eyes and started sneezing. Turns out Laur has a mild cat allergy. He likely always did – it’s just that he thought that having red eyes and a cough was normal.
And I guess it came to be normal when you have a cat allergy and your wifey is a cat rescuer. Note: None of our kids have cat allergies. And all of our kids have a cat or four – save for Elaine who lives in South Korea. She gets her fix at Cat Cafes which are all the rage in S. Korea.
In fact, she helped me set one up in Sudbury – Small Things Cat Café. The first one in Canada. https://www.sudbury.com/lifestyle/purrking-up-for-cat-cafe-230997