I live with a wild cat. Well, not actually a wild cat. Factually, Emmy Lou is a declawed Domestic Shorthair-type feline that found us as a stray.
Before anyone complains: She was already declawed when she found us. We'd never even begin to think of doing such a cruel thing to a cat. She can't protect herself at all, other than biting, and she can't climb anything in order to escape a pursuer.
Consequently, Emmy is a house cat. She never goes out. Open the front door and Emmy doesn't even begin to make a move to try to get out. (She probably remembers those horrible days before she found us, when she was running loose in Discovery Park.) No, Emmy is never out. Absolutely everything she needs, and probably a lot of things she truthfully doesn't, are provided for her.
So what does she pay in return? A gentle purr and a rub against your leg? Or maybe what seems like a smile from the other side of the room? Emmy is just where she wants to be.
But back to the aforementioned wild cat. As the day begins to grow into evening and Emmy has crawled out from underneath the wheeled dish trolley, where she's spent the entire day sleeping against the warm-air register, she'll first check her food bowl and then walk into the living room to see what we're doing.
My partner, the Lady Marjorie, and I are usually either reading the paper over a cup of tea or are somehow otherwise engaged, perhaps even in conversation. Emmy will note this and then, turning her head from first one of us and then to the other, lay her ears back and assume a wide-eyed, deranged look on her face. At this point she'll turn and madly charge off, bound for some far reaches of the house.
"She'll be back," speaks my partner. "She just wants to play."
Sure enough, a few minutes later she comes tearing back into the living room, running hard with her soft paws thundering against the hardwood floor. As she makes the turn in front of the fireplace, her lack of traction becomes apparent. If she were a race car, I'd say she got loose. Her driving rear legs try to pass her front paws in the turn.
Have you ever seen a cat spin out? It's an amusing sight.
The Lady Marjorie will then begin tossing any number of cat toys to get Emmy to run after them. She either may or may not, depending on her mood. Sometimes she just looks at us with an expression on her face that asks, "What are you, nuts?"
One day a few months ago, we were talking to the cat. We always talk to the cat. She never listens, but we still talk to her. Anyway, my part-ner had just been to Petco, and she tells Emmy, "I've already got your Christmas present."
"Really," I ask, "what did you get her?"
The Lady Marjorie cupped her hand over her mouth so the cat couldn't see her lips move, and then spelled out "M-I-C-E." I think my partner gives Emmy entirely too much credit for intelligence I'm sure she doesn't possess.
"You got her kitty sushi?" I quizzed. I hadn't seen her carry in any sort of cage that might contain a mouse, and I'm sure Emmy, being clawless, couldn't have caught one anyway.
"No," she answered impatiently, "catnip-filled ones."
More cat toys. Like the house isn't littered enough with them as it is.
A few weeks ago, Emmy was sitting next to the DVD player when the movie we were watching ended. I keyed the button on the remote to open the disc tray so we could change the disc. When the tray slid out, it startled her.
When I retracted it, she took a bat at it with her paw before the tray disappeared.
She then sat tilting her head first one way and then the other as she sniffed at the front of the player. I keyed the sliding disc tray open again. That backed her up.
I retracted the tray again, and she ran up to it and took another bat at it. We're now almost using the DVD player more to amuse the cat than we are to play DVDs.
The cat has learned, though, to ignore it unless the front isn't lighted up. If we're watching a disc, she'll come over and sit in front of the player until we make the tray move. Sometimes we turn it on just to watch the cat react. We've got a $100, electronic, state-of-the-art, remote-controlled cat toy.
And we wonder, who's in control here?
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