Cats and me: A mutual disrespect
I despise cats. My feelings towards felines do not come from under-exposure to the animals. Growing up, Mom and Dad always had a mouser or two around the place. Actually, growing up, I was a bit fond of cats (though I’d never admit it now).I suppose my dislike for cats began when I moved into an apartment in Cookeville while attending school at Tennessee Tech. To keep myself company, I thought it might be neat to get a pet to keep in the apartment. Dogs were out of the question; they bark too much and require walking. Cats, I figured, are relatively quiet and can use a litter box. In other words, they’re low-maintenance, and with 18 credit hours and a part-time job on my schedule, that was just what I was looking for.
I picked up a copy of the Cookeville Herald-Citizen and immediately found an advertisement for free kittens, drove out to a small farm and picked out an orange furball.
As the kitten grew, my family (the cat made the trip back to Scott County with me each weekend) bestowed upon him the name of Big Orange, in fine Tennessee tradition. I just called him Cat.
Cat and I had a hate-hate relationship. There is no doubt in my mind that he was demented, and no one can convince me differently.
The animosity between the two of us didn’t develop overnight. I suppose it started when Cat ripped a hole in my best pair of socks (and, being a poor college student, I didn’t have many pairs of socks to spare). He also took a liking to climbing my leg as I studied at the computer. Others insisted that he was only attempting to portray friendship. I argued that he was intentionally “picking” my breeches with his claws. And after he picked two pairs of slacks, I decided that my wardrobe would be better served for Cat to be banished to the living room of the apartment. For a couple of evenings, he sat outside the closed bedroom door and meowed pitifully. But at some point, he gave up trying to get into the bedroom and took to hating me.
Cat would spend his days lounging on the back of the couch. When I came home, he would glare at me in that way that only cats can and slink off behind the couch or into another room. When the weekend rolled around, I would coax him from hiding with a can of catfood and stick him into a laundry basket (redneck pet carrier). He’d hiss at me all the way to the car until I let him out in the back seat. He would perch himself in the back window and fix his evil glare on me for the duration of the 90-minute trip from Cookeville to Robbins.
Cat’s inability to socialize was just the start of his troubles. He had a terrible temperament. He refused to eat dry catfood; canned food only. I spent more on his meals than I did my own (50 cents for a can of catfood as opposed to 18 cents for a package of Ramen noodles). He would sulk in the corner of the room while I opened his food and set it on the floor, then make a mad dash for his plate, where he’d stand hovering over it in a protective stance and growling until I left the room.
Cat also refused to drink from his water bowl. I wondered where he got his water until I stumbled into the bathroom in the grips of sleep one morning at 2 a.m. and saw an orange, furry tail protruding from the toilet bowl. Cat was a very peculiar cat but, frankly, I thought this was a bit over the top, even for a cat.
It soon became apparent that one of us was going to have to go. Since I was paying the rent, Cat drew the short straw by default. Fortunately for him, my mother decided she would take him in and let him patrol the barn for mice. Apparently, she had taken a liking to him, and he to her. Which was odd because I didn’t think Cat liked anybody. So Cat became Big Orange and lived out the rest of his life as a barn cat. And actually became quite civilized. I supposed that some cats are just not suited to indoor living.
That was the end of my feline ownership days . . . for a while. When moles began taking over our lawn a couple of years ago and I dulled my lawnmower blade taking the tops off of mole hills, it was decided that we needed a mole-catcher, and that’s how the current Cat of the House arrived. I call her The Cat; my wife calls her Fluffy; the neighbors call her Snowball. Kitty is so confused that she doesn’t know which name to answer to.
Unlike Big Orange, Fluffy is an outside cat. And she doesn’t catch moles. She prefers to camp out underneath the bird feeders during warm weather and snag golden finches. She’s also quite adept at tearing into bags of trash.
But all-in-all, Fluffy isn’t a bad cat; I can handle one outside cat. In fact, I had almost decided that I didn’t mind cats, after all.
However, this past week, Fluffy had all her “boyfriends” over, and that was a bit too much. Our front yard was like a feline version of the popular television reality show Bachelorette. Every tomcat in the neighborhood showed up to court Fluffy. She taught them how to climb into the trash can and rip into the bags of trash. They taught her how to leave dead birds on the front porch.
And the fighting. Apparently, Fluffy is quite a prize to be won. I learned something about tomcats: When they fight, they don’t spar with one another; they play for keeps. They fought in various pairs over the course of the week — sometimes the gray one against the orange one, sometimes the orange one against the gray and white one, and so on — and usually with at least one more tomcat standing nearby playing referee, tail twitching intentedly as he watched his comrades.
It all came to a head a few nights ago. Part of our basement is closed off from the rest of the house for storage purposes, and is accessible from the outside only. Apparently, I forgot to place the padlock back on the door and the wind blew the door open. At around midnight, I heard the blood-curdling screams of fighting felines coming from beneath the floor under the bed. Grabbing a flashlight and a broom (had I known then what I would soon know, I would’ve gone armed with something deadlier than a broom; like, say, a high-powered rifle), I snuck around the back of the house in my bare feet and pushed the door open.
As the door opened, the first thing I heard was running footsteps in my direction. As my light flashed across the room, I saw just a glimpse of something big and furry coming at me. That split second wasn’t quick enough for my mind to register that this furball was just running for the open door, and not at me in a threatening nature, but the split second was enough time for me to realize that the broom was going to do little good against this critter. I jumped, stubbed my toe against the concrete, jumped behind the h/c air unit to get out of the way, and landed barefoot on the spray nozzle for a garden hose.
You laugh, but had you seen what I saw, you would have been scared as well. This cat was as big as a bobcat and twice as ugly. Its immensely thick fur made it appear even bigger, and its face was covered in battle scars. Had I engaged in battle with this cat, just me and my broom, there is little doubt in my mind who would’ve won. Fortunately for me, the cat seemed to want nothing more than to get out of the yard and into the swampy area behind the house as quickly as possible. I kept my light on its glowing eyes that were glaring at me from the edge of the swamp as I slowly backed away and into the house, where I hobbled back to bed with my sore foot and dreamed dreams of Satan taking on the form of a cat.
Lest my stance against cats be wavering, it has been reaffirmed: I despise them. But one thing is for sure: I’m going to start being nicer to Fluffy. With a protective suitor like the monster I encountered in the basement, I would be foolish to do anything to draw her ire!
