Cats & Spats

It's getting real catty here in the Conquest household. Not that having 5 cats wasn't catty enough. I'm going to *try* to post some pictures of the purrpatrators involved in the latest catcaphony (please pardon my intentional misspellings).

Of our 5 cats, Coon, our black and brown tabby, is our oldest at 15 years. He IS the keymaster. He is the master of a thousand paw-slaps. If you're not *in* then don't even look at him. When he gives you "the look" (and ladies, we all know how to give "the look" so you know what I mean), all the cats visibly pull their heads back and blink, some are even known to step back and even run away (chickens!). The only cat Coon has ever let near him is Maki. She's a seal point Himi with a flat face and a tooth that sticks outside her left lip. She's like the brain dead kitty. He could give her "the look" all day long and she would be thinking "Oh, he loves my butt!" You all DO realize that the most important feature of a cat is their butt, right? If you have cats, you should be smellin' what I'm steppin' in. Coon even let her groom him.

So, to make a long story longer, Coon has recently decided to lick all the hair off his right hind leg. And I do mean all! That leg looks like it belongs on one of those hairless cats (perish the thought). So after a week of wearing the cone head collar (that's another story) and making "messes" (polite word for the big D and I don't mean Dallas word) all over the place because of the medicine that I had to pry open his jaws to give him (yet another story), we decided there had to be some other solution. So, the vet gives me this spray-on stuff, supposed to be part antibiotic and mostly stuff that tastes bad to cats so he would quit licking it. So I get home, have the obligatory wrestling match where I try to get Coon to give me his back leg, I spray it on him (an me, and the couch, etc.), and then he jumps off running and shaking his leg like he's doing the Hokey Pokey. And being the smug, fart smeller I am, I thought that was pretty easy. I was about to be given the hair raisin' of my life.

Since Maki has butt-sniffing down to an art form, she proceeded to run behind Coon trying to sniff his butt. She has to run because her legs are shorter and stretch up her head because Coon is taller. This itself is entertaining, especially when you get the butt train going where three or more are in line. This has to be seen to fully appreciate how she gets her flat face right up under the tail of the other cats--if it were any other cat, it's nose would be buried a half inch up the other cats rear. Then, after a good long whiff, my dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks, sweet-as-sugar-pie cat Maki turned into Damianna Omen herself. She started hissing, then growling then went into some high-pitched screaming and then I am sure it was the Devil himself howling in the most unearthly sounds I have ever heard come out of a cat. She jumped right on top of Coon and was clawing and spitting and yowling and he was running down the hallway with her firmly attached to his back like he was going to run out from under her. He was dumbfounded. Cliff and I were running down the hall trying to catch them to pull Maki off his back and she was still moaning and howling and hissing. Poor old Coon couldn't even defend himself, he's declawed and lost both of his top fang teeth several years ago. Maki has all her equipment (well, excepting the reproductive parts). But when it first started, Cliff and I couldn't figure out what that noise was, we were thinking maybe the Tornado Siren was going off. Then we finally realized it was coming from the smallest cat in the house. Let me tell you, the other cats split the scene so fast, they left their whiskers behind! Now it's kind of like one of those Cialis ads where Maki has gained some new-found respect. Everyone is giving her a good wide berth. She's still growling at him and she positively hates it when he sits by me. She jumps up there and starts whacking him on the head with her paw, like Chinese water torture until he gets tired of it and leaves. Then she leaves. What's up with that? You can't have her but I don't want her? I'm starting to get a complex. I'm just not sure where I stand in the household pecking order...