Day 25: Naughty cats

Between You, Me and the Lamp Post

Day 25: Naughty cats

Whenever I hear or read that cats shouldn’t be fed table scraps, I can’t help but smile. I never feed my cats scraps, but occasionally they’ve helped themselves or at least tried to.

Yesterday I was having lunch, a sandwich with Baby Bell cheese. I got up to pour myself a drink and when I came back Charlotte was eating the Baby Bell.

Over the years there have been other incidents but none funnier than the stunt Pitoe pulled.

Pitoe was a big white cat who loved to go hunting at night. This was before indoor cats became popular, when I lived in a suburb, in a quiet street with hardly any traffic.

During the day Pitoe would sleep or groom himself, but come nightfall he would position himself at the backdoor, look at us over his shoulder and the message was clear … let me out.

He would come back a few hours later with or without the catch of the day. Sometimes it was a mouse, other times a bird.

He caught his most famous catch on a Saturday afternoon. He’d strutted into our neighbor Christiana’s garden and a few minutes later we heard her shrieking “Pitoe, come back here! Pitoe, drop it!” Then to her husband “Constant, stop that cat!”

Hearing the commotion I went outside and saw Pitoe come running into our garden with … a string of sausages in his mouth and dragging them between his paws.

Somehow we managed to stop Pitoe, take the string of half fried sausages away from him and return them to Christiane. She told us that Pitoe had taken the sausages right off the frying pan.

Having lost his loot, Pitoe was set on revenge. And he got it.

One night, Mom took three pork chops out of the freezer. Knowing that we had to go out, she put the pork chops on a plate on top of a high cabinet to defrost. When we came home Mom started dinner and took the plate off the cabinet. She was more than a little surprised when one of them was missing. Not the biggest one, not the smallest one, but the middle one.

Sometime later another stunt.

Mom had made brochettes. I was the first at the table and tried to push the meat pieces off the wooden stick with my fork. After putting some effort into it, a piece of meat suddenly came off, flew off my plate, and skidded across the table. Quick as lightning Pitoe’s paw grabbed the meat and he ran off with it.

It was only later that I learned how dangerous it is when cats eat human food. I had given one of our cats, Rocky, a piece of meat. Shortly afterward I noticed him under a chair making strange movements with his head. 

With a shock, I realized that he was choking on something. I rushed him to the vet who managed to get the piece of meat out of his throat. That was the last time I ever fed a cat off the table.

That’s not to say that they never get anything. Holly, for instance, is very fond of strawberries.