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.
