Look at this - it's almost as big as I am

This was the day of days, the moment when my life reached the pinnacle of success and triumph. I caught a full grown adult rabbit. My first. It was so huge I couldn't get it through the cat flap - which is why the photograph is poor. Celia was in an inexplicable mood. Instead of welcoming me home as I dragged the dead body right down the farm track, she shuddered and ran indoors. So she would only take the photograph through the door. That's why it is bad quality. She let me down.
Indeed her emotional reaction was really perplexing. On the one hand she called to Ronnie, with a real note of pride, saying "Look what he's caught." Then she said: "That's good news for my vegetable patch." All well and good. Then came a series of remarks suggesting that she had had second thoughts. "At least, it's dead. I just couldn't bear it if I had to dispatch it." Then: "I wish he wouldn't kill everything."
The woman can't decide whether she's proud of me or upset by me. Talk about conflicting emotions. You see she wrote a book called "One Hundred Ways to a Happy Bunny" because she loves rabbits. Ånd she's connected with the Rabbit Welfare Fund. So she is actually as fond of bunnies as I am - only in a rather different way.
It all rather spoiled my triumph. Who'd keep humans as pets. They are so devastatingly irrational.

Shun small girls - except Alice

The homo sapiens young are usually to be avoided. The babies are incredibly backward, compared with kittens. Kittens walk within a few days, babies can't for weeks and weeks. Then a year or so later they start taking an unhealthy interest in cats. Sometimes there are interesting bits of food to be picked off them, but usually there's a lot of dribble, clutching hands and generally inappropriate behaviour. Still later on the small female homo sapiens becomes even more sinister. Small girls always want to cuddle cats. They insist on picking them up all the time. And they commit the unforgivable sins of DRESSING UP cats in baby clothes and trying to put them in dolls' prams.
But there is one small girl I like, because I am rather an exceptional cat. I actually enjoy being picked up and I don't mind a cuddle. So when Alice came to stay last summer, we bonded. She is not like most small girls. She knew cats were different from dolls and she never tried to dress me up or put me in a dolly's pram. She learned how to call me properly, using my proper name in the right sounding call. Then she would pick me up putting her hands carefully under my bottom so that I was supported. I would be cuddled for a bit and carried round the garden by her. Then I'd jump off and do something interesting. She'd call me and, because I am a people cat, I would go for another cuddle.
Admittedly after about two hours, I got bored and disappeared because I had better things to do. William, on the other hand, just made himself scarce from the beginning. He may have social skills with other cats (being brought up in a 70 cat household) but he's no good with small girls. Not even Alice.

I have been stabbed.... cat abuse at the vet's.

I am spitting with indignation, hissing with rage and still shuddering with fear. My beautiful black pads are wet with anxiety. I am NOT happy at all. Humans seem to think they can do anything, anything at all, to us. The only reason why I didn't launch into instant reprisal was that she was much bigger than I am and (shame on her) Celia was on her side. Indeed it was she who put me through this awful ordeal. She has betrayed our friendship.
It started with the cat box. I often sleep in mine and Celia puts little goodies in it for me to discover. So when she threw some nice food into it, I naturally went in without thinking twice. She whisked up the box and put it in the car and drove off. I shrieked with indignation, of course, but she took no notice. Obviously I tried to dig my way out but even when I had crawled under the furry lining, I could not break out.
When the car came to a stop, it became worse. She took me into a room smelling of misery and pain and disinfectant and (of all things) dogs and other strange and intruding cats. I was horrified. A couple of the female humans there looked vaguely familiar from the days when they cuddled me as a kitten. I wasn't in the mood for social niceties so I ignored them both. Besides, they smelled horrible too. There was a lot of human vocalisations and I got taken into a room, rooted out of my cat box, and forced to submit to handling harassment from the human vet. Veterinary surgeon my tail and ears. More like a thug of the worst kind. She stabbed me with a needle inflicting bodily harm on an innocent animal. I HATE this vet woman. I hope she is tortured by a thousand rat bites, smothered by a herd of rabbits, bitten by a very large dog, or just mauled by a big cat, big enough to make her feel as angry and fearful as I do.
And Celia needn't think that a few cat treats will make me feel better. I ate them but she is a Judas of the worst kind.

She's done it again! She's stolen my mouse!

Humans! They are the lowest of the low species! She's stolen my mouse! A particularly lively fat one at that! In the evening, I am imprisoned in the house with the cat flap shut. It may be warm but it gets very boring, especially at about 3am. Obviously, I do my best to liven things up by jumping on her bed, worming my way into it to play the you-are-a-mouse game with her, or just pounce on her head as she lies on the pillow. But I am afraid she quite often just sleeps through all this.
Out of the kindness of my heart, I thought I would make my own arrangements for a 3am game. Instead of treating her as a mouse, I brought in a proper one. It was big, surprisingly fat for this time of year, and had a most exciting squeak. I stashed it under the fridge, as I often do, but it insisted in running round the kitchen and wedging itself in the corner of the open kitchen door. It squeaked so loudly that even a deaf human could hear it. (They can't hear much. Their sense of hearing is inferior to ours.)
That woman - I can hardly bring myself to name her - heard it and fetched a wellie. She then wedged the wellie near the door with the idea that the mouse could run into it. Well, for about five minutes it didn't get the point, and Celia and I had good fun. I tried to catch it and Celia tried to stop me. Very enjoyable and my blood was up, so if I scratched her I couldn't be blamed for it. The excitement of the moment had me in thrall and besides it was aimed at the mouse. Then the idiotic little thing finally got the point and ran into the wellie. Celia picked it up, getting in the way of me the predator and the mouse my lawful prey, and chucked the wellie into the hedge.
No mouse. No more fun. No 3am snack. That woman is a kill joy. For a moment or two I could have killed her - only she's so much bigger than I am.

George's Christmas Message to Cats worldwide

My human and I would like to wish you all a happy Christmas.
This is the season of the year when we look back over the past year, take stock of the present and make resolutions for the year to come.
One thing is certain: the inevitability of change for all cats, who face the difficulties of sharing our lives with humans. Those cats who live lives completely independent of this species have the reassurance of a changeless though challenging life style. The search for a dry place to sleep, for mice and other prey to eat, the joys of caterwauling nights and the love of kittens, will be for them the pattern of nights and days, as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
But for us who live with capricious and dysfunctional bipeds, these enduring values may be lost in the pace of hectic mutability. Ours is the harder road. The species we domesticated cannot leave things as they are. Homo sapiens (surely a misnomer of the highest order) is addicted to a life of hurry, doing not being, worry and acquisition. New homes, new furniture, new pets, new babies, new routines – this is the demanding and worthless lifestyle they try to inflict on us cats.
It is therefore for us to reassert the timeless values to which our species holds fast –the love of familiar faces, the pleasure of well-known and well marked territories, the inestimable reassurance of unvarying family scent, the excitement of hunting if not prey, then dustbins or even a single autumn leaf. While all is chaos around us, a chaos only too often wantonly instigated by our humans, we need to live our lives in our way. A way nonetheless that allows us to love this extraordinary and self destructive species.
I am reminded, as I write these words, of last autumn when I was able to forgive Celia for the time when she locked me in the garden shed for three hours. I also remember that day of days, when I bagged a partridge, and she was deluded enough to take the quivering bird from me and set it free. Or the many Sundays when I have had to forgo breakfast until an unduly late time because of her determination to sleep well past the proper time of waking. I have risen above all this to offer her forgiveness from the goodness of my black heart.
During the last year I have been on state visits to Paul and Steffi next door. Their pleasure in my company has fully repaid me for the effort of getting through their cat flap though I wish they would offer a choice of cat food not just the same biscuits. These are good quality but a change would be nice. I have also visited their daughter Jessica and, with an exquisite condescension, deigned to sleep on her bed. She was duly honoured and expressed herself appropriately by opening a tin of cat food.
Compassion, as the past year has taught me, is perhaps the single most important virtue that we cats need. If we are to make sense of our companion pets, we should reflect on their history and learn the lessons from it that they seem incapable of seeing.
We must also to practice that other important value of our times, that of tolerance. If we can remember that our humans are vulnerable to that emotional disorder of living in the past or the future, if we can pity them for their inability to enjoy the moment, if we can (and I know it is difficult) feel sorrow for their incapacity to know what is really important in life…. If we can do all this then we can offer them the compassionate love that they so badly need.
As we step over the threshold of another year in the company of these poor deluded humans, may I wish all of us cats a happy New Year.
P.S. I am very indignant about this silly hat. Just when I wanted to look dignified. She tricked me into wearing it. Waited till I was having a little nap on the sofa, popped it on when I was asleep and took the picture. This is a SNATCHED photo. The woman will stop at nothing.

Tale of a tail

My tail is particularly beautiful. It is a 37 centimeters long - black all the way down without any vulgar white tip to it, sleek and shining. You can learn a lot from my tail. My main way of greeting Celia from afar - sort of "Hello there" - is to put my tail upright with the tip turned over and towards my head. Human beings with cats usually recognise this signal and some scientist theorize that we cats developed it specially to communicate with them. The idea is that the poor saps couldn't read feline body language easily. So when Felis silvestris Lybica, the African wild cat, decided to domesticate them, my ancestor concluded he needed a better way of saying hello. So he ran up the tail flag, so to speak. Even a really stupid human notices this as a cat steps towards him. I use Tail Up a lot as I like most human beings and most of them, naturally, are impressed and delighted when they see 37 centimetres of tail, with a neat little twist forward, coming towards them. They see it before they see my black whiskers and dazzling golden-green eyes.
Celia, as a good servant should be, pays a lot of attention to my tail. If it starts to lash, she keeps her distance knowing that a disciplinary claw may be next. She also notices it when I am going to pounce on William like a mouse - something he does not appreciate. So she will call out to him to get his attention so that he can lie on his side and protect himself with the lie-on-side claws at the ready posture. Lying down isn't submission. It just clears all four paws for action in this case.
William's tail is much fluffier than mine and some people might think it is prettier. But mine is much longer and snakier.
Tail up!

Human gardeners and cats.

I tried to catch a goldfinch on the bird table this morning, and got tangled up in the wire netting Celia had placed there to thwart my natural urges. Several resentful thoughts came to me. Celia's friend, Jane Owen, has just published "One Hundred Ways to a Beautiful Garden," a book that humans will enjoy. However, there is nothing much in it for cats - except perhaps for the idea of tree houses. Now if there had been a tree house near the bird table, I could have leapt down at the finches rather than merely leaping up. Life in the garden is really rather confusing. On the one hand Celia loves and tries serve cats (what right minded human doesn't). She also likes pretty birds like goldfinches. I agree with her there. They are charming - and delicious. Nice little crunchy bones when you grab them. I also enjoy just watching them from the warmth of the kitchen. But she never eats them. Just watches. I think she has a disorder of the predatory sequence. I go in for the whole natural thing - eye, stalk, pounce, grab and eat. She just gets stuck in the first bit of it, watching. Dysfunctional, of course. But worse still, she thinks she is normal and I am aberrant. So she stuffs scrumpled wire netting under the shrubs just in the place I would sit and start my stalk. She makes the bird table about 7 feet high - because I can only jump 5 feet. She creates a wildflower garden (Jane Owen is good on this) then objects when I do my wild thing and try to slaughter the wildlife. Lord, humans are so cranky, contradictory and downright mad.
So for Christmas, buy your human "One Hundred Ways to a Beautiful Garden" and buy your cat, "One Hundred Ways for a Cat to Train its Human." My favourite book, of course. It works too.

Do cats forgive humans?

Re-reading my last blog, I wondered if I had forgiven Celia for her negligence about the garden shed? Do we cats have a forgiving nature, like dogs. Dogs forgive easily. Indeed they fawn on their abusers, creeping back with tails wagging sometimes urinating a little out of fear and appeasement. It's the pack instinct. Dogs are social animals and they have an enormous need to stay within their human family, so much so that they will put up with too much. Celia's remembers a poor labrador which was taunted and teased by a teenager. Its adult owner, female, used to hit it every time it urinated out of fear. Every morning she would come down to the kitchen to let it out into the garden, and when it crept towards her urinating out of frightened appeasement, she would hit it. "It knows it has done wrong. That's why I punish it," she told Celia. Nothing Celia could do, would persuade her that its urination was out of fear of punishment and it had no idea that this was making her punish all the more. We cats would never behave like that - not that creeping towards punishment each morning. We don't do appeasement gestures. We do, in extremis, urinate out of terror. As the SAS say, "Ådrenalin is brown". That's why sensible humans, put a layer of plastic between the car seat and any cat carrier which doesn't retain urination. We don't apologise for it. We would never ever go towards a human who is going to hit us. One hit and we are off. And we never forget a really terrifying traumatic experience.
So do we forgive? Yes, we do when the bad experience isn't that bad. But we don't forgive physical abuse like dogs do. We leave home. That morning I got shut in the shed, I considered taking one of Celia's red spotted hankerchiefs, wrapping up several envelopes of Felix, putting it over my shoulder and walking off to the nearby village to see if I could find a better home. But then I thought about how warm it is here, and how the Felix in unwrapped for me, and I stayed. If forgiveness is letting go and moving on, I have forgiven her. But she'd better watch out. I might feel differently if she does it again.

Sundays and human sloth

It's Sunday and for some reason Celia considers this day to be one in which she is allowed to fail in her housekeeping duties. She thinks she can sleep longer and keep me waiting for breakfast. But discipline must be maintained, as a character in Bleak House put it. (I pride myself on being a bit of a literary cat). On Sundays harsher measures are needed to wake her up. Usually I just jump on the bed (if I am not there already) and wake her by nosing against her face in the feline friendly rub. If I do this one or two times, her eyes usually open sleepily. I then dribble a little just to make the point. She is rather touched by the dribble. She thinks its a sign of love. Actually it's a sign that I am hungry. Four or five cheek rubs later and her eyes are open. If they close again, I sit on her face, or as near to her face as I can get. That usually does the trick but if it doesn't I roll on my back and wave my paws in the air, which makes her laugh. If I've got her laughing, I've woken her.
On Sundays, however, she seems determined not to respond. She just hunches herself further under the duvet. Duty and responsibility are forgotten in sloth. Today I bit her nose. I don't like doing it but sometimes these things have to be done. I'd tried charm and it had failed. It was time to see what pain would do. It was very effective.

The humans next door

My friends from next door arrived for the weekend. Paul and Steffi have a proper attitude to cats and they also have a cat flap left over from when Henry lived there (more on that another day). William and I naturally pop in to see that all is well when they are absent. And we pop in for a snack when they are present. They have suitable beds and armchairs for a nap. Last week a builder was in doing something to the loft. I kept an eye on him. He also had a suitable attitude to cats. He fed me some dried food from the tin that is kept for me and William. Where does this fit in with the human selfishness I was writing about yesterday? It is simply this. Our primary servants or caretakers often want us just to eat at home with them. They want us all to themselves. Yet it's natural for us to pop in elsewhere. There are inviting cat flaps all down the street and even where there is no entry, humans can usually be persuaded to let us in if we sit at the back door looking hungry. Or on a windowsill. A sensible cat can fix three or four alternative caretakers to feed him. It's particular useful if your humans are out at work during the day. Somewhere in the street is a lonely human, with the central heating on, who would love a visit. Like Paul and Steffi. It's important for their welfare to do this kind of social work for lonely humans. I thnk Paul and Steffi are all the better for it.

Human selfishness

Homo sapiens is a selfish beast. Under the guise of caring for others, it exploits, plunders, mistreats and even kills. Even when it pretends to care, it doesn't. Of course, our species, catus catus, is linked to humans. Some cats see it as a symbiotic relationship - both species benefits. We have access to the mice in their granaries and houses. They have cats as a pesticide to keep down the mice and rats. But there are signs that this relationship is becoming more intense. Some cats are kept in a state of dulosis, enslaved by their humans, their freedom completely gone. These are the indoor cats, kept in small flats, usually in an impoverished environment. There's nothing to do. Nothing to hunt. Admittedly, meals are provided. There is also the companionship (if you can call it that) of a human being who returns at night for about ten hours before leaving again. Oddly enough even in this situation some cats are inspired to turn round the relationship. They obedience train their human who comes home earlier giving up chances to socialise in order to be with the cat. Thye often rule their human's relationship - seeing off competition from boyfriends. Does this mean the human is enslaved by the cat? That the dulosis is, so to speak, two way? A feline anthropologist should do some research on this. Is this kind of relationship healthy for the cat? Well for a young vigorous cat like me, it would be incredibly frustrating. My hunting instincts would be almost unexpressed. For an older cat, or a disabled cat, this may (with prper environmental enrichment) a suitable environment. Is the relationship healthy for the human? For a young vigorous human probably not. The love instincts are being expressed across the species at the expense of human-human relationships. For an older or disabled human this may be a suitable relationship.

Teaching a human to eat mice

I have a sense of responsibility towards my humans. I am trying to train them out of human dsfunction into feline competance, so I brought in a mouse for them. It was pretty good hearted of me, as it wasn't one of the small long nosed voles that I usually spare for them. Frankly these don't taste good to cat so I tend to give them to my humans, who are much less fussy about what they put in their mouths. It's never worked. Even humans dislike voles. I stay optimistic though.
Today it was a real mouse - large and deliciously fat. My mouth was watering, even as I clambered in through the cat flap and set off to find Celia at her wordprocessor. There was a moment of temptation on the stairs. Would I succumb to a little nibble? Sternly I told myself that I must stay with the original generous impulse. I sprang on to her desk and placed the mouse neatly between her and the keyboard, not far from the hard device that humans call a mouse.
At first her reaction seemed appropriate. She too sprang up from her chair with what seemed like a delighted shriek. Then, as a series of completely inappropriate vocalisations followed, I realised that an emotional sympton of musmalfunction ( a disordered reation to mice) had taken over. She threw herself out of the office then came back with yards of lavatory paper - just too late. Realising what had happened, I had smartly picked up the mouse and was legging it down the stairs to the cat flap and out on the lawn for my delayed meal.
My generosity ignored and insulted. Not a word of thanks.

My other pet

My other pet is the larger older human, Ronnie. Before I arrived, he also fell short of the proper behaviour of a companion animal. He had a territory problem. With the arrogance typical of homo sapiens, so called, he took the whole world as his territory. Always running off to some far flung place. A sort of war junkie or self styled foreign correspondent. While more sensible humans stayed at home, he was out in the Middle East, North Africa, etc looking for trouble. He would go missing for weeks at at a time then turn up at home through the big cat flap known as the front door looking for dinner and love. Without so much as an apology. Like cats, humans fight over territory and compete for goodies like food and love. But, unlike cats, their fights are massed ones. The whole pack/nation joins in or they make special packs, with terror names, and work together. This is the instinct for pack life gone very wrong indeed. Us cats know better. We don't do packs. We fight our battles as single heroes. To the feline mind, human behaviour is dysfunctional anyway.
Ronnie is now quite a good pet as he has settled down. Nothing to do with neutering. He was never fixed, as pets really should be in an ideal world. It's just age brought him to his senses. No more notes left on the kitchen table saying "Off to Algeria" or Iraq, or Israel, or Lebanon, or some place with fighting. He's settled down - though there were other worse moments in the cat-human relationship which I will save for another post.

My name is George

Humans! Don't you find them a pain at times. My whole kittenhood was shaped by the moment when some rescue humans grabbed my mother, fed her, and stuck her in a Cats Protection pen. From then on I became the kind of cat that lives with this odd species. Naked as the day they were born, they never grow real fur. They're huge, ungainly, and in every way ridiculous. But they make great pets. Literally.
So this is my take on life with a domesticated human. Mine is Celia. She'd have made a great pet in her early life if only some cat had her neutered. But they didn't. So she really wasn't suitable as a pet then - always out late at night, bringing back human toms, making loud music (they can't caterwaul properly), and with only one thing on her mind. A quick trip to the human vet and she'd have been a much calmer better human.
I got her when she had settled down. She's now the right kind of pet for any cat. Anxious and willing to go hunting for the right kind of cat food. Ready to warm my bed in the main bedroom (only she takes up a lot of room at night). Sometimes if I need the extra room she'll even get up in the early morning and go to the spare bedroom.