It was a long hard move, but for the cats it was definately worth it. 

Pictures and mores posts coming soon, dear readers….

Even back in the day, Jack London’s dog had to leave town to get a convincing earful.  But what can you expect of a big slobbering dog?  Housecats are by nature more attuned to the summoning sounds of unleashed freedom.  They can hear it in virtually anything, from the door creaking open to the littlest cry of the smallest nuthatch or chickadee.

What is freedom? Oh the college papers I wrote, the class debates I had to try to answer that one, and yet, am I any closer to an answer? Of course not. If I wanted to ask a question that I could actually answer, much less actually experience, I would have asked:  What is freedom to a cat?

Freedom to a cat is quite simply whatever lies on the other side of the closed door.  Isn’t that simple?

Cats seem to inherently understand that unanswerable ponderings of the nature of freedom isn’t making anyone any more free.  They also seem to deeply grok that a closed door is a far better obstruction to said freedom than what most people have to work against.  For how can you possibly expect to experience freedom if you hardly define it, whereas all a cat has to do is sneak outside between your legs at the right moment as you are coming or leaving.  Really, cats are pretty smart about this whole freedom subject.

Speaking of freedom, there was a time in my life when I did not feel like a feline prison guard.  Initially, the house I live in was not referred to as Kitty San Quentin but was called seriously and with no trace of irony “The Cat Palace.”  In other words, my cats idea of freedom has seriously impinged on my freedom.  But at least I can still open the door myself – take that, my little thumbless inmates.

The Kitty Camping Season is officially off and running! The Association of Camping Kitties (ACK) has formally declared July as Cat Camping month.

ACK veterans like Brody and Herman need not be told.  They know it will soon be time, time to hide (aka “pack”) the leashes and break out the kitty barbeque set.

Send your humans to the outdoor store for the squeeter juice and cat GORP and get ready for the wildest, craziest camping trip of your cats’ lives.  It’s been a long, cold, hard winter, and we need some serious sleeping under the stars to try and forget it.

Ahh, the midnight meadow-mouse nature walks, the mornings blending into evenings lazing about in the tent, the visit from the campground peacock…

These camping expeditions really revive kittys’ batteries for another relentless year of cat 9-to-5.

What’s this hare stuff? It’s the year of the Cat, and here at Self Help for Cats, we plan to celebrate it 365 days straight.  But what does it mean to celebrate cats to people who already worship them? Well, we’re going to find out this year! So bring on the cat champagne and the human catnip!  We’ll be eating wet food from champagne flukes and reading our fortune cookies in meowish.  Bring the kitties to the Chinese New Years Parade in San Francisco, and let them ride on our shoulders and be adored.  It is trully the year of the cat!

These cat fashionistas know when to work and when to party — and it’s time to party if you can’t tell!  The latest catreprenuerial concept to hit the big time has a lot to celebrate headed into the new year looking sexy and feeling on top of the world.  With top role models like these. watch out Victoria’s Cat’s Secrets!

Sure enough, I had awoken to the horrible sounds of another battle-supreme between the two cats who otherwise can’t get enough (sleep on top) of each other.  The “brothers” who are not related, the boys who fill our days with joys have lately become a troubled duo.  Call them Paul and John, they ain’t getting along, at least not all the time like they used to.

As a result of this recent conflict, Brody has developed a cat scream so ludicrously pained and tortured that you are sure he’s being subjected to the kitty equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition or similarly perverse torment event.  But instead of on the rack, I always find him after one of his cacophonous battle screeches locked in a mere stalemate with Panther, and I wonder: how much of my work in the performing arts have really effected my cats?  Is he really getting hurt or is he acting the drama kitty queen to send us running?  Or, possibly, have my interludes into aria singing led to the beginning of a new art form altogether — the cat opera!?

Well, it all has me and Hank singing the battling-cat blues, and wondering what to do with a spoiled little fat cat named Panther who has turned into a raging bitch over his new need-to-slim-down-or-get-sick diet.  Damn cat doesn’t know a pecking order if it came and nailed him on the nose, which it has, ala Brody, more than once.  Panther is a good case for kitty prozac, possibly, but first we’re gonna try every holistic approach we can find.  The problem is serious, and humor only helps so much.

So, we’re going to seek some professional help with all the loads of cash we have lying around over here, what with the economy being so good. In the meantime, I found this list of “holistic approaches” to cat aggression.  I’m going to try some of them, although holding a magnet to Panther’s head for 20 minutes a day also seems fairly extreme as far as home remedies are concerned.

Karmically, I believe Hank and I can trace our current problem back to an Abyssinian named Denial. Denial had the messy habit of pissing directly backward out of the litter box door, an act that confounded his human companion, my apartment mate, who would complain about it often.  I clearly recall being really, really glad that my cat didn’t do that.  Well, that kind of thinking never pays off in the long run, because now I have a cat who does the very same thing.  

It wasn’t always like this, but somewhere along the line a litter box got moved facing the wrong direction.  Herman changed his orientation inside and wham-o, now we can’t for the life of us keep that cat’s piss inside the box.  Who knew our dry, contained reality was so fragile? 

That single change of direction soon set in motion a cascading avalanche of new litter box technologies at our house, each tried one after another and soon dismissed.  Finally, Hank was forced to invent his own “solution,” and this current set-up is by no means ideal.  What Hank has brought into the world is nothing short of a litter-box mansion, a box within a box, which if you ask me (and Hank did not) is a rather extreme response.   Yes, the litter mansion has solved the issue of escaping piss, but it’s caused its own problems, not least of which being that it’s ugly, it’s huge, it stinks, AND it’s in my living room.

Outside on my patio lie the wreckage of boxes that didn’t work.  The closest one to working, The Buddha Dome Deluxe, is a lovely lavendar dome with stairs spiraling up to the box proper.  How, you may wonder, did Herman Panther manage to twist his piss out of this arrangement? 

I don’t know how, I only know that at some point Herman became a horizontal urinator.  And the force of his stream can seep right through seams, around corners, down stairwells.  It’s remarkable really.  It’s made mince-meat of the best litter-box architects of our time, and I have the pile of defeated attempts to prove it.

So for now, the new litter mansion keeps the problem at bay, so to speak, and creates more problems, like all the time it takes Hank to clean the various litter-mansion rooms.  I did manage to find a nice grass mat to hide the hideous thing with, and that’s about as resolved as we can get on that topic.  Sorry, Martha, the truth ain’t too pretty sometimes.

When Herman saw Santa Claws out the window on our first Christmas morning at the house where I now live, he went utterly ballistic and turned on his very best friend, Brody.  I had to jump out of bed to separate the fighting madcats with a broom and sweep Herman Panther into another room, closing the door on the devil cat he had become.  Peace on Earth it wasn’t.

Herman, we have since learned, was suffering from his first case of displaced aggression. He saw a cat outside (ever since known by the name Santa Claws) and got so upset and confused, he failed to regonize the friend he sleeps on top of every day of the year.  After a short while apart, he calmed down and was absolutely fine again with Brody.

Now, after a few similar episodes ever so often, Herman did get better.  After he got used to the house more and that one time he got outside  for a few hours. That seemed to really help him, even though it scared the hell out of me when I realized he’d escaped. (He was found sauntering the sidewalk looking supremely confidant for an indoor cat).  For a blissful year, Herman’s occasional aggression seemed to be cured.

Unfortunately, Herman also struggles with Catfood Gobbling Syndrome, as I named his need to inhale food.  He’s had some see-sawing weight issues that have finally landed heavy on the unacceptably-fat side.  Herman is dangerously overweight, putting him at risk for bad cat diseases, including diabetes and more. He needs to lose several pounds.

Unfortunately, our efforts at weight-loss, like taking the food away so it’s not available at all times, has stirred Herman’s animosities.   He complains loudly and has even taken to going outside the box.  Once, he started pissing on the bed when we were in it!  Herman’s stress has also led to a couple of aggressive incidents with Brody. 

Clearly, Herman is upset about getting his food limited.  And because our other cat needs more food (he’s older and has not adjusted to food not being left out), Herman is very likely mad at the sense Brody is getting preferential feeding. It all came to a head with the cats fighting at 6 am starting a yelling argument between me and Hank. So we got cats fighting now AND people fighting.  Peace on Earth doesn’t stand a chance.

Well, we’re all just trying to chill now, and make sure everyone gets enough grooming, doting, feeding, and playing to feel like we can make it through these holidays. Between this month’s traffic accident, totalled car, big pay-cut, roof leaks, not to mention the residue of stress from larger bad news sources, my cats haven’t had it easy being my dharma protectors of late.  In fact, I better end this sad report and go wake them up and get them to play.  I’m on a mission for World Peace and feline weight-management, if I have to accomplish it one cat at a time.

I welcome your stories, ideas, and solutions.  May many Happy Chill-Out Days come to you and your humans!  Peace and purrs to all!

You stare deeper through the pine needles and the tinsel and something is –staring back!  Then you recognize it.  That’s not the alien glaring back at you;  It’s the very wide eyes of your cat having the closest thing to a back-to-the-wild experience he is ever going to have in your living room. 

Now you see him ratcheting his way up the Christmas tree trunk, branch by branch, causing the entire tanenbaum with trappings to undergo something like a 6.0 catquake. The moment you realize it’s your cat causing the localized hurricane is the moment your cat finds your extremely-precious heirloom ornament. You watch in horror as he winds up to give it a good bat with his paw to send it flying across the room.

“Nooooo!” You yell, hurling yourself into space like a wide receiver to save the small piece of family history.

Okay, maybe this hasn’t happened to you.  But whether your cat ignores the Christmas tree, climbs it, or silently sabotages it by drinking all its water, you can watch other people’s cats climb their Christmas trees at a little place called youtube.

Just don’t place your cat in the Christmas tree like some you-tubers obviously did, because this is just asking for trouble.  These people would open Pandora’s Box if they came upon it at a garage sale.

Snow banks are one effective
and pretty way to keep kitty from climbing the tree.