Nearly Eight Months Old

The tiny kittens we hauled out of the carport are no longer tiny. They are now outgrowing the green mat on the counter we put there to try and discourage them from sitting on the keyboard. (It doesn’t work.)

Charlie likes eating, corks from winebottles (merlot and grenache preferred, but he’ll take anything), eating, playing with balls especially ones that bounce, eating, sleeping, eating. Diego likes catnip, a feathered toy, the space behind the bathroom door, spitting in fun, getting into the bag of walnuts, and jumping up high to see out. They both like snogging (substitute nursing which I’m guessing at this point will never go away).

The Feline Neighborhood

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on cats and place.

Berkeley owes much to its cats, I once read. Or at least I owe much to them: when I was growing up near there, going on walks and meeting the neighborhood cats was my main contact with the feline deities, since we didn’t have cats at home. I wonder now if there’s a relationship between neighborhoods that are good from a cat’s point of view, and neighborhoods that have been built for walkers. After all, one of life’s great pleasures to go for walk and meet up with a friendly cat. Village Homes, the archetype in this town of a humanely-planned development, certainly has many cats contentedly roaming the interior walkways and sunning themselves on vine-bestrewn wooden fences. The photographer Hans Silvester is justly celebrated for his photographs of Greek village cats. And who wouldn’t want to walk around a Greek island village?

We need to ask the cats their opinion on urban design. Will a feline Christopher Alexander come forward, please?

Cats and Place

This entry is for the Ecotone wiki’s joint blogging topic, Cats and Place.

Never really having been a cat person before it’s been interesting to watch what were two feral kittens grow into something resembling adult cats—with no adult training. They know how to find warm spots in the house; they react to chaos in a chaotic way, attempting to reverse it; they play with all kinds of things they shouldn’t and shun cat-specific toys.

What to learn from a cat: find a place you like and take over; eat; nap a lot. (Don’t go into scholarly publishing, in other words.)

Rats to Cats!

All of a sudden our house is being plagued with these centimeter-long beetles that stink when they’re handled. But the cats are enjoying having live creepy-crawlies to pounce on: not too many moths around these days.

Here is some light verse presented “with Satirical Intent for the Amusement and Edification of Both Fanciers and Detractors of the Feline Specie”. It’s illustrated with lovely pen-and-ink drawings.

Another One

Trapped another cat this morning. This one’s black, gorgeous green eyes. Doc Rock decided his name was Othello (we didn’t know what to do if it turned out to be a she, or rather I put Desdemona down as a question mark at the vet’s this morning, when I took it/him in to get fixed, where he got designated a him).

I don’t know what to do with this one. He’s ten months old, almost certainly too old to be tamed properly. People don’t want black cats much except for cult followers and people seeking halloween accessories, much less semi-wild black cats.

I’ve been lucky again to be surrounded by so much support, Debbie of Feline Lifeline and Catlin and all the folks at work and everyone else too. Thank you all. They’re going to cut the corn tomorrow which will be almost more stressful for the cat than staying inside the crate, so I think we’ll opt for the crate (I might even take it to work to get it out of the hubbub). And though it pains me, a birder, to do this, I think we’ll release him eventually. I might try keeping him for a few days to see how he does, but this requires more time than I have at the moment.

New Horizons In Image Search

Here’s a tabby cat, perhaps on his way to Cheshiredom.

(From LibrarianInBlack)

A Home for Carlos and Blake

Carlos and Blake, the two kittens that emerged from the cornfield behind our house a couple weeks ago, got adopted today. Just as last Sunday, they went to the Petco today where Feline Lifeline holds their adoptions. It didn’t take long before a family came by with a little boy who was quite interested in Carlos. Then the mom started to handle Blake and immediately bonded with him. It turned out that her 13-year old cat just died of cancer Thursday. They came into Petco looking for another kitty and ended up leaving with two! So Carlos and Blake, tentatively renamed Tumble and Pumpkin, are off to their new home, shared with a yellow-orange 6-month old tabby named Flash (three different shades of orange cats in one house).

Here’s a picture of Blake at Petco, curious as ever.

Click On Cats

Monday evening we went to the library where I found a copy of Getting Started: Clicker Training for Cats by Karen Pryor. I’ve seen references to clicker training before but never read anything about it. Basically, the idea is that you can train animals by getting them to associate a good behavioral action with a marker signal such as you clicking a clicker box. Soon the animal learns that a click means a treat is coming and starts to expand his behavioral repertoire so as to produce more clicks.

Pica went and bought an inexpensive clicker box and we’ve been having fun working with Charlie and Diego. Both are now able to follow a dowel about and touch it as a target. Tuna is working well as a treat, though we need to figure out the best way to dispense it.

Speaking of clicking on cats, Rate My Kitten is a good site to visit if one is looking for distractions.

Leaps And Bounds

Diego is by a good bit the most agile of our two kitties. He’s always leaping up on things, mostly just to check out what’s happening. (Charlie is getting better at his leaps but often it seems has to pull himself up by his forepaws.) Yesterday evening he gave a prime example of this. One of his favorite spots to sit is the trunk bag that sits on top of the rear rack of our tandem. This itself is about a yard off the ground. Anyway, I was changing the 5-gallon water bottle on our water dispenser—glug, glug, glug it was going, filling the empty dispenser. Diego leaps in one bound from the tandem rack to our couch, then without missing a beat, leaps in a second bound from the couch on to the countertop, and then steps over to the water bottle to check out the commotion. He’s a regular scientist, our Diego.

All We Do Now Is Wait

I’ve set the trap to try and catch the two new kittens while Numenius is out at Spanish. I ran to buy smelly cheap catfood and a robust carrier. This evening I spotted their mother, a bright orange tabby. I’m hoping we catch her; the kittens will stay near her (though they are now coming up to the back door and exchanging hisses with Diego and Charlie) and should be easy enough to catch.

I’m guessing, having seen them this closely, they’re about two months old. Tamable. What a relief.

Numenius already has names for them: Carlos and Blake. I’m assuming the orange tiger’s what inspired the latter…

Postcript, 10:10 pm: both kittens are caught and in a carrier in the carport. We found a new use for the Honda Element, aka Nellie: use as a place to transfer kittens from a trap to a carrier without fear of their escaping when your bathroom’s no longer an option.