measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fun with Gus at PetCo Last night was a Gus car adventure. We took the little guy to PetCo to get some of the SoftClaw covers for those talons of his-- our mattress will thank us later. So will our brains when we don't have to thump the end of the mattress to shoo the Gus!Beast at 3:30 in the morning when Gus decides to use a corner for a scratching post. It was also a case of Mel and Erich being weird, freaky cat people. Yes, I take my cats on leashes to PetCo. If dog owners can do this, so can I, right? No, I don't care that cats don't care to walk on leashes. Dammit, I'm giving them an adventure. :) *sigh* He did surprisingly well in the car. Since it was the one cat, we didn't go through the whole routine of pulling out the cat carriers. We harnessed and leashed him and just carried him to the car. He sat on Erich's lap the entire way over to PetCo (about a 10 or 15 minute drive... not that far). And we discovered something interesting on the car ride. The best way to "groom" a short haired cat is to just take him in the car. Combs be dammed (which really don't seem to work on a short-haired cat anyway). Seriously-- this cat was shedding any possible loose fur that could come off. Right on to Erich's pants, of course. Heh. Anyway, we brought him into PetCo and set him down so he could slink around for a while. And what does he do? Try to scootch himself right under one of the display cases, which couldn't have had any more than a four inch gap from the floor. And he was halfway under it before Erich grabbed his lower half and did his imitation of delivering a breech baby. That whole thing you hear about mice being able to squeeze into any opening the size of its head? It applies to cats too. Amazing. So we continue through the store, this time with Gus in-arms, to the cat section in the back. Our usually sleek panther cat was sporting an impressively wide pipe-cleaner for a tail by this time. Which leads me to another sidebar... All my life I heard that short haired cats have all of their hair stand on end when they get extremely scared. I've seen pictures of cats with their backs arched, hair standing on end. Essentially, scared shorthaired cats become porcupines, and are supposedly just as prickly because they seem to develop claws on every point of their body (i.e. amazing paw dexterity to rip the shit out of you). My two black cats do not do this. When they get scared, body fur stays flat. But their tails poof up to these hysterically huge poofs that look like long, snakelike bottle brushes. Fizzy "pufftails" on average about once a week, thanks to the repeated pouncing by Gus. Gus doesn't pufftail that much, but given that he's twice Fizzy's size, the pufftail is quite impressive. So... back to PetCo. Erich immediately put Gus up on one of the cat trees, where he rested for a few moments before scurrying into a nearby cat tower. He seemed happy there. Erich announced he'd stay there to keep an eye on the cat. I went off in search of these claw tips so we could judge the diagram sizes against Gus to get the right fit. After a few minutes and a couple questions to a store clerk, I found them. I also grabbed some of the double-sided sticky tape to put on the mattress to deter the behavior... because while we might solve the direct Gus issue with these soft claws, the reality is that he learned the behavior from Colley, who stretches up on anything he pleases to "scratch." But because there are no front claws, it's been a non-issue. Wicker furniture, my leg, the back of my office chair-- go to town, Colley. No harm can be done, no foul. Well... we now need to deter Colley, too... because Gus will still try to scratch there if he sees the big brother doing it, but Gus has all of his claws so we can't let it continue. They might not be able to spray, but I'm well aware that there's a bit of a male territory battle going on in our house. Scratching is part of it. So far the only two places Gus has scratched is the mattress and an old chair in the living room, which he's somewhat breaking of on his own as we give him a firm "no." Now came the fun part-- how many humans does it take to extract an 11-month-old kitten from a cat tower? During the extraction, Erich managed (with Gus' help, of course) to remove the harness from the cat. The first extraction wound up being JUST the harness and the slack of the leash. Great. Thank Goddess the cat was scared shitless, so he didn't move. Erich managed to reach in and get him, pull him out, and we put him up on another cat tree pedistal to put the harness back on him. He was surprisingly willing. We measured the softclaws, and they seem to be the right size. Great. Done. (You're married. Kiss her!) Up to the front, pay for stuff, and ready to go, right? Not quite. One of the other employees there had a box with a towel over it... and in it was a teeny, tiny kitten. Ten days old (and really looked more like a rat than a kitten at that point). Apparently it had been abandoned by the mother, so the employee was trying to care for it and help it thrive. It was ironic that we had Gus with us at that point, who had been in the same boat, but thankfully was about two weeks older when we'd found him last August. But both Erich and I melted. We're so bad. I know. *sigh* It was time to get home-- and the ride home was relatively uneventful. Gus seemed a bit more relaxed on the way home, but still shedded profusely. We got him back, released him from the harness, and he almost immediately returned to his normal, sprawling self, knowing he's at the center of the universe. He's such a Leo. We decided to hold off getting the claws on him until tonight- let him calm down from his adventure. I really hope it works. 10:26 a.m. - 08 July 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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