Minding The Field

Oblivious to the approaching balloons, Charlie keeps the field safe from the ravages of the gophers.

Cat Bite Tuesday

I returned home this evening after waiting out a rain shower to find Pica having a cat bite party with our neighbor Leila. This tale begins with Leila’s housemate Mary befriending a feral cat around here that she’s named Sophia. A couple weeks ago, with Pica’s assistance Mary tried to take Sophia to the vet to get spayed. The cat however bolted when she was almost in the carrier, and early this morning was the time for a second attempt. About 15 minutes after going across the street to help out this morning, Pica returns holding her hand in a paper towel, saying she needs to go to the hospital, and oh, Leila got bit too. The exact sequence of the events cannot be recalled by Pica, Leila, or Mary.

Anyway, Leila came over for a dinner of dal and to exchange war stories and tales of antibiotics (two separate courses for Pica; a big shot and one course for Leila). Mary comes by later and enjoys some dal. All parties are joking about the incident now, except for the poor cat, who is now under quarantine at the vet’s.

Knitting Assistant

Charlie makes the best of finding an interloper in his chair and proceeds to supervise the knitting.

Minding The Laundry

In addition to his habit of dozing in the dryer, Charlie these days is back to the practice of spending some of his morning sleeping in the laundry hamper.

Self-Aware

Magpies have recently been identified as the first non-mammals to exhibit self-recognition, using the usual protocol for self-recognition experiments of daubing paint on the animal and seeing if they react to it while looking in a mirror.

Surely self-awareness comes in more cognitive flavors than can be captured by the mirror test. Often when I scritch Diego, for instance under the chin or behind the ears, he’ll reach for my hand with his paw and use it to guide my hand to the spot he really wants scratched. Is that glimmerings of self-aware behavior? I don’t know but it’s pretty endearing.

Printer's Companion

Diego is not the first cat to develop an interest in the printing arts. The special collections librarian Donald Kerr at the University of Otago discovered on page 250 of the library’s copy of Astesanus de Asts Summa de casibus conscientiae, an extremely rare work from 1472 or 1473 printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin, three cat paw prints in ink.

Kerr noted that Mentelin had been described as “a careless printer”, so perhaps this was a good example. He checked with several other libraries holding copies of the work to see if there were any other cat paw prints to be found, but no such luck. The librarian at the State Library of Berlin noted however on their copy that there was bad damage on the initial and final leaves from rodent nibblings, which could explain why Mentelin kept a cat around the print house.

(From PhiloBiblos.)

Clawed

Diego had four teeth out last week. It was a miserable time for him, for us: he’s not yet four, and some kind of autoimmune virus thingy was just eating away at the roots of the teeth on the lower left of his mouth. All my vet friends say better out than in; he’ll learn to eat hard food (and in fact is already eating it with alacrity) and will get along fine. I feel like a failure as a pet-owner and all the rest. But after all, if he doesn’t need to catch his food, what does he really need teeth for? (I try to convince myself of this. Ha.)

The hard part, though, is the antibiotics. You mix the powder with water and shake hard, hoping its volatility lasts through the heat wave. (Unlikely.) The cat hears the syringe and hides under the bed, in the closet, or in one or two other places we have not been able to discern, even though there are only so many places to hide in 600 square feet.

I depress the plunger as claws from front and back feet try and get some kind of purchase on my flesh, hoping the banana-smelling stuff has gotten down his gullet in enough quantity to prevent whatever infection might be brewing, the source of impossibly larger vet bills.

My legs look like I’ve been running through brambles…

Black Cat Ale

You thought you were coming home with a case of your favorite microbrew…

Cat in Higgins Eternal

Since we’re going sketching at the zoo tomorrow, I thought I might try the experiment of putting Higgins Eternal ink in a new Sakura Koi waterbrush and sketching with that. Charlie here is my test subject. So far so good, the main trick is going to be keeping the brush from bleeding ink all over my hands.

Our Oldest Friends

A DNA study just published in the journal Science suggests that domestic cats split from their wild progenitors in the Near East perhaps 100,000 years ago. This well predates the archeological evidence for cat domestication, which goes back 9500 years.