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House prices are rising in Toronto. People are paying over the asking price. Vendors no longer take the first offer that meets their price. They collect bids, then compare them to see who offers the most. Bids are then being sent back for more.
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First Cloud got rid of his collar. “We’ve got a spare blue collar, we’d better put it on him,” we said. Then Fog gave his red collar the slip. The collars are breakaway so that if they get caught on anything, they snap open. That’s fine except that I think the cats try to get out of them. They also bite each other’s collars. So now we have two almost-identical grey cats running around naked.
Marlowe, our “princess” cat, is touchy about her rights. She doesn’t want to be disturbed, doesn’t want her long fur brushed, doesn’t want to share the back yard with the rowdy young boy-cats. And she doesn’t want to take her medicine.
We’ve been having to give her pills and liquid medicine. She fights the pills and detects the liquid medicine in her food. (It smells disgusting.) Then she refuses to come home to take them. She has been camping out fifty metres away, in the parking lot behind some local stores. And she shows up only occasionally, when we reward her lavishly with canned cat food.
But the last time she showed up I kept her in and took her to the veterinarian. Dr. Au determined that the interstitial cystitis was gone but Marlowe has a bladder infection instead. There’s nothing like eating rats and then licking yourself, I suppose! So I decided on a new approach to giving medicine. I bought a package of “pill pockets.” And they work!
A pill pocket is a treat with a hollow centre. You slip a pill into it with one hand and press it closed with the other, so that the smell of the pill isn’t on the treat. (There are dog-size ones, too.) I fed Marlowe one last night with her antibiotic in it. She gobbled it down eagerly and looked for more. So I gave her an empty one. I have more than enough pill pockets for this course of medicine. That’s a relief. If she’ll take her medicine every night the battle is half won. I don’t want her to develop a resistant strain of bacteria by taking it unreliably.
Meanwhile, the vet is checking the bacteria to make sure it’s not a resistant strain. If it is, I’ll exchange the antibiotic for something stronger. But it’s a relief to be doing something right.
Our cat Marlowe can’t be be all that sick. After her trip to the veterinarian, I let her out in the back yard. She came in and I fed her a generous meal; then she went out again. She was back about twenty minutes later with a fair-sized brown rat, more or less unharmed. She played with it for a while but didn’t seem interested in actually eating it. Of course, she wasn’t hungry! It would lie still, then try to creep under her, then away into the grass. (I haven’t been able to mow because of rain.) She would leap onto it and carry it back into the open.
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When she began to lose interest, of of our young boy-cats, Cloud, took over. He was fascinated but is not the experienced hunter that she is. He let it get into the undergrowth of the garden. There, the rat began to shriek its shrill war-cry and leap at him, about six inches into the air, so he backed off. The rat made a break for the fence-line. He managed to keep it from getting away but couldn’t re-capture it. So I brought out his brother Fog. Between the two of them the captured the rat again. When I saw it last, Fog was galloping away with it and Cloud was chasing. I was reminded that polo was originally played with the head of a sheep as the ball.
Later, Fog was eating something in the yard, but when he saw me he came in for some real cat food. I went out and picked up the partially eaten carcass of a rat. But it was a smaller rat than they’d been playing with! I found the larger rat later. Both went into the compost.
It may seem cruel to let the cats toy with rats but anything that keeps down the rats is OK with me. And I can’t stop them in their unsupervised hours. Rats are always with us in the city. The only reason we don’t see them in the open more often is that they are very territorial and are always at war against other tribes of rats. Where they feel safe, they are out in force during the daytime. The waterfowl enclosure at High Park used to have fat rats strolling through the bushes back when people were allowed to feed the ducks. I’m sure there are as many rats as people in the city, perhaps more. The previous neighbours have decked over their whole back yard and the rats live quite safely under the decking (true of any boardwalk at ground level). The businesses across the parking lot keep their garbage in a shed and I know Marlowe hunts the entrances to the shed.
My real fear is that the cats will eat a poisoned one and be poisoned themselves.
Marlowe, my four-year-old cat, came stumping into the yard yesterday morning. She has been hanging out behind the businesses on Pape Avenue to avoid the youngsters, Cloud and Fog, and just coming back for food—sometimes. In the last week or so I think she has been less assertive than usual, so I wondered if she was getting worse. Time to take her to the vet, if I could catch her at the right time!
But yesterday someone set up a power saw where she likes to roam. I guess that the noise drove her away. When she came in and ate, I locked the cat door and called the veterinarian to make an appointment for her. She’s overdue for a checkup on her previous problem—stress-induced cystitis. I kept her in overnight.
She surprised me by being sociable. Part of the time she lay beside me on the couch and later she jumped onto my lap while I was using the computer. She settled down for over an hour. I had other things to do but I didn’t want to disturb her.
The kittens spent the night outside, giving Marlowe a peaceful night indoors. In the morning I closed up access to the litter box so that she’d develop a full bladder for her urine sample. The vet did an X-ray and also took the sample by needle—Marlowe’s most hated procedure.
It took about 20 minutes to develop the X-ray. It turns out that Marlowe’s cystitis has cleared up but she has a raging bladder infection.
I have an antibiotic for her and some “pill pockets” to hide them in. I hope she’ll stick around for them.
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P.S. She can’t be too ill. She went out and came back in short order with a rat.
I was alerted by a chorus of bird alarms this morning. Cloud, one of my grey cats, had caught a just-fledged robin, still with some spots on its breast. He was teasing it in the back yard. First I took him away from it, which made him struggle; then I took it away from him, which made him search frantically. I carried it out to the back lane, looking for a good high place to put it. Unfortunately, it leaped out of my arms and fluttered down to the ground. Rather than chase it, I walked back to the yard.
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Cloud was still looking for his prey. Eventually he exhausted the potential of the back yard and ran out into the lane. The alarmed chorus renewed and he was soon back with the robin. This time I let him keep it. He shortly killed it and started nibbling. The next time I looked out, Cloud was sitting and his brother Fog was eating.
They ate part of the robin and I dropped the rest into the compost.
I’ve been wondering if someone is feeding our cat Marlowe, because she doesn’t always come home for supper. However, she’s an avid ratter and it’s quite possible she’s feeding herself. Tonight there was a chorus of squeaks from the back yard. I opened the door and Marlowe rushed in with a rat hanging from her jaws. She headed straight for her “cat castle,” which provides an enclosed cave. She thrust the rat inside just long enough to change her grip or something. By the time I got in there, she had killed it efficiently and was eating it. “Nom, nom, nom!” She polished it right off and then meowed to be let out again.
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