I got a cold – help! Pills are so ugghhh

Dear George,
I must admit that we had a miserable summer so far! It was raining almost every day! Few days ago while I was on a “hunting” adventure I got caught in a really bad rain.
It was pouring and I got stuck between a bush and the house. Of course, I couldn’t get back in the house until the rain stopped and by then ….it was too late.
Next thing I know…there I am…sneezing, coughing and breathing “funny”.
My humans took me right away to the vet and of course, he did the whole protocol that I hate so much. He said that I have a cold and prescribed antibiotics…instructing my humans how to “push” them down my throat.
My question to you, dear George, is: how can a cat (that is vaccinated) catch a cold so easily? And a second question: can you make any suggestions to my humans on how to give me the antibiotic pill without “pushing” it down my throat?
Hopefully yours,
Minnie

Dear Minnie,
Even if a cat has been vaccinated, it can occasionally get a mild dose of cat 'flu or other kinds of respiratory problems. I guess that is what happened. It's still important to vaccinate against cat 'flu because without the protection of vaccination a severe attack can leave lifelong disability.
Pills! There is now a cat-friendly device for putting pills into cats (forget the pill gun which isn't) - Easytabs, a meat flavoured cover for a pill made by Bayer. The fact that Bayer has made this suggests that in the cat versus human struggle over pills, we WON. Below my signature is the old joke about pills and cats which in this case reflects reality. There is more detail on this (from the human point of view) on www.fabcats.org
From our point of view pushing pills into our throats is just a huge and painful intrusion! We are not greedy like dogs. We don't just gulp things down. When Celia hides a pill in a piece of cat food, I can smell it miles away and I do not approve of eating stuff that smells bad. We cats like fresh mice not rotting carcases like omnivorous dogs (who actually eat poo, would you believe.)
My favourite ploy with pills is to give the sneaky impression that I have swallowed them. I hold them in the side of my mouth. I did this successfully for six months, in the days when worming came only in pill form (now there is a spot-on). Celia couldn't understand why I always seemed to have tapeworms (from the fleas on the mice I ate). She is a sloven so only vaccuums under the spare bed when somebody is coming to stay. Pulling out the bed, she found my stash of worming pills. I had held them in my mouth than sneaked under the bed and had spat them out!
In theory the way to put a pill into a cat, is to kneel down and place the cat between your legs, facing outwards.With thumb and middle finger, pull cat’s head back until it is facing straight up at the ceiling. It is crucial that the cat’s head must be facing upwards at 90 degrees Use gentle pressure from thumb and middle finger on either side of the cat’s jaw, at rearmost crease of the lips, to open cat’s mouth. Pop tablet on the tongue as far back down the throat as possible. Close cat’s mouth and keep the head pointing up at the ceiling. Hey presto, the cat will swallow the pill.
In practice I can usually evade this one! We almost all can. That's why there is the familiar joke about cats and pills - below my signature. Cats rule.
Love George

Instructions For Giving Your Cat A Pill


1. Pick cat up and cradle it in the crook of your left arm as if holding a baby. Position right forefinger and thumb on either side of cat's mouth and gently apply pressure to cheeks while holding pill in right hand. As cat opens mouth, pop pill into mouth. Allow cat to close mouth and swallow.

2. Retrieve pill from floor and cat from behind sofa. Cradle cat in left arm and repeat process.

3. Retrieve cat from bedroom, and throw soggy pill away.

4. Take new pill from foil wrap, cradle cat in left arm holding rear paws tightly with left hand. Force jaws open and push pill to back of mouth with right forefinger. Hold mouth shut for a count of 10.

5. Retrieve pill from goldfish bowl and cat from top of wardrobe. Call spouse from garden.

6. Kneel on floor with cat wedged firmly between knees, holding front and rear paws. Ignore low growls emitted by cat. Get spouse to hold cat's head firmly with one hand while forcing wooden ruler into mouth. Drop pill down ruler and rub cat's throat vigorously.

7. Retrieve cat from curtain rail, get another pill from foilwrap. Make note to buy new ruler and repair curtains. Carefully sweep shattered figurines from hearth and set to one side for gluing later.

8. Wrap cat in large towel and get spouse to lie on cat with its head just visible from below spouse's armpit. Put pill in end of drinking straw, force cat's mouth open with pencil and blow down drinking straw.

9. Check label to make sure pill not harmful to humans, drink glass of water to take taste away. Apply band-aid to spouse's forearm and remove blood from carpet with cold water and soap.

10. Retrieve cat from neighbour's shed. Get another pill. Place cat in cupboard and close door onto neck to leave head showing. Force mouth open with dessert spoon. Flick pill down throat with elastic band.

11. Fetch screwdriver from garage and put door back on hinges. Apply cold compress to cheek and check records for date of last tetanus shot. Throw T-shirt away and fetch new one from bedroom.

12. Ring fire brigade to retrieve cat from tree across the road. Apologise to neighbour who crashed into fence while swerving to avoid cat. Take last pill from foil wrap.

13. Tie cat's front paws to rear paws with garden twine and bind tightly to leg of dining table. Find heavy duty pruning gloves from shed. Force cat's mouth open with small spanner. Push pill into mouth followed by large piece of fillet steak. Hold head vertically and pour pint of water down throat to wash pill down.

14. Get spouse to drive you to emergency room; sit quietly while doctor stitches fingers and forearm and removes pill remnants from right eye. Stop by furniture shop on way home to order new table.

15. Arrange for vet to make a housecall.

Should I go on teasing her by making my human jealous?

Dear George,
I have found out a good way to tease my humans. My two carers are Janet and John, like the children's books of past years. Janet does everything for me. She feeds me, makes sure the litter tray is clean, trains me on the lead and in the car. John does far less. I have discovered I can really irritate Janet by showing a distinct preference for John. I join him, not her, on the bed lying at his, not her, feet. I walk out of the room if Janet gets too near me. I rush to welcome John when he comes home and ignore her when she does. It's easy peasy. John wears a sort of smug look on his face and Janet looks anxious. How far should I take this?
Jasmine. (Apologies for black and white photo)

Dear Jasmine,
I think we all enjoy teasing humans. They make it so easy for us. They are ridiculously over sensitive when it comes to feline attention. They sulk if they think they are not getting enough or just go around looking worried (like Janet). It is part of the power that we hold over them. Power that they simply don't even acknowledge.
Have you tried the visitor game? I expect you have. I enjoy it. I scan all arrivals at the house. Those that try to come towards me, or attempt to touch or pet me, I ignore. I walk away with a haughty look or, better still, rush off under the sofa. These are cat lovers and most of them are devastated by my behaviour.
Those that don't seem to like cats or that ignore me, I walk up to and rub against their ankles. Some may even be frightened of cats. They are even more fun. I leap on to their lap at the first opportunity then crawl up their chest trying to lick their face. Their horror is good fun.
The best way to play the game is when there are both kinds of human in the house. The cat lovers are even more upset to see other humans being the recipient of my favours. The cat haters are annoyed and feel, in the presence of my own humans, that they cannot just swat me off. If you haven't tried it, do so.
As for Janet, why give her a break? She is totally co dependant about cat and adores them. So whatever your behaviour, she will keep looking after you. So my advice is to play the game as much as it amuses you. But about once a week, jump on her lap and play adoring kitty. This will keep her on the boil, so to speak. You can eavesdrop on her pathetic conversations with John about "Why won't Jasmine be like she was on Monday?".
Cats rule.
George
PS Would Whikky Wuudler like to communicate via www.celiahaddon.com with a photo so I can run the interesting question about cat food contents?

Saggy tummy syndrome - how can I stop my human dieting me.

Dear George,
You may not be able to see from the photo, but I am a large cat. A seriously large cat. I put it down to my inheritable British Blue genes. Large size runs in my family - or so I like to think. It's not really fat. Just toned gorgeous muscle round the neck with a bit of FSTS, better known as feline saggy tummy syndrome. Alas, there are signs that my human wants me to diet.He has bought a huge sack of low calorie cat food. What can I do to stop him?
Herbie

Dear Herbie,
Feline Saggy tummy syndrome or FSTS is well known among cats of a certain age but from your photograph (which conceals the rest of your body) you certainly look like a well found cat of gravitas. There's a layer of muscle (I can be tactful) over the top of your neck which if repeated lower down must be fat (sorry to use the f. word) saggy tummy syndrome, FFSTS, the stage before obese saggy tummy syndrome known as OFSTS. Frankly, it would be a good idea if you got more exercise. There are ideas for indoor cats on my secretary's website, www.celiahaddon.com
That said, it is none of your owner's business to police your meals. What on earth gives the human species the right to interfere with the feline pursuit of love, life and happiness. Why are humans so fattist? Meals should be regular, of good quality and of sufficient quantity for you to enjoy. If you choose to be fat, why not? I suspect however, that your human is an enabler. While buying you diet food, he is probably feeding you on the sly. He may even be "feeding" his own codependance by over feeding you with unhealthy snacks. Maybe he too has human STS and he is working out his own psychological inadequacies on you. Humans can be much, much fatter than cats.
Rather than deprive you of the joy of food, he should be thinking of ingenious ways to get you interested in exercise to release some endorphins. Of course, the most obvious way would be to import living mice into his house, but that would be unduly cruel to the mice. He could however start feeding you in a more fun way. Hide the food throughout the household before he goes out. Get a food dispensing ball, and put it in there. Get various cardboard boxes, and hide the food in them so that you have to pull it out with a claw. Put food on the top of the cat gymnasium (that is, if it is steady enough to bear your weight.) More time spent playing with you, instead of slumping in front of the TV, would help too.
That way he would be adding fun to your life, giving you more exercise rather than simply depriving you of food. I blame him anyway for your weight. He is an enabler. Could you rehome yourself next door for a better kind of owner?
George
PS There's a very good comment about cat food below, which I will take up in a future blog.

Help! How can I get out of cat rescue?

Dear George,
Can you help me get out of here. I am banged up in a small pen with nothing to do. It all started when somehow I lost my way home. I had been investigating some dustbins in a nearby street and there was a huge noise from a monster lorry passing by. A kind of gigantic fart. It terrified me and so naturally I ran. Then I couldn't find my way home. Then I couldn't find any decent food in the new area so I positioned myself at the door of one of the houses and a very nice woman took me in. At least I thought she was nice until she picked me up, thrust me in a box and took me to this place. The food is OK but people keep passing by and staring in at me. And I can smell other cats nearby. How can I get out?
Suzy
Dear Suzy,
Those people passing by and staring at you are catless human beings who have come to a cat rescue shelter. Of course it is rude to stare but they know no better, poor souls, and, besides, they are deprived of the love of a good cat. They are looking for a proper relationship - with a feline, of course. If you can bear it start looking back at them and begin to assess whether they look OK or not. This is the time you decide whether they are worth hiring as human servants.
Unless you are good with human kittens, avoid the ones with little humans by their side. Turn your back on them or get back into the bed and look as malign as possible. When you see a nice middle aged female or an elderly couple or a well groomed man (metrosexuals make good cat lovers), put your head on one side and look as attractive as you can. Mew plaintively at the human of your choice. Perhaps wave a paw - this is human body language for hello. (I know it is a rude gesture in cat language but they don't know that.)
If it is the right kind of pen, move towards the front of it. Roll on your back, eyeing them and flashing your tummy! You'll soon be out!
George
PS There may be a delay in the next posting. My secretary, most thoughtlessly, has decided to take a short walking holiday on Exmoor. She would have done better to stay at home and do her duty to her cat.

Why does my human pull my hair every day?

QUESTION:
Every day I have to run and hide behind the fridge. My human then hauls me out, dumps me on her lap, and starts pulling out my hair with a metal implement. Why does she do it? It hurts? Of course, I try to wriggle free but I can't. So I freeze with misery and just let her do it. Why do humans torture cats in this way?
Jasmine.

ANSWER:
You have to assert yourself, Jasmine. It's not enough to run and hide. Take back your power as a cat. Have pride in yourself. This is a claw and order situation. Claw her. Bite her. Hard.
Why does she do it? She thinks she is grooming you. Have you bothered to look how she grooms herself. She uses the same metal implement or something like it. She pours water on her head. She then puffs hot air on it. Some humans even use hot metal combs. Then they hiss sticky stuff. It's almost unbelievable, except for the fact that they haven't got hair in the right places. They can't use their teeth and tongue on themselves. Can't reach those pathetic few tufts of hair, you see. It's really very sad for this highly dysfunctional species.
But if they had any consideration, they would use tongue and teeth like we do when they groom us. They could easily lie on the floor and lick our fur. Use their teeth to tease out a few knots. Why don't they? It's just too much bother. The servant problem for us cats is really difficult. Humans are lazy creatures. I don't know that I have ever heard of a successful training method for this problem.
Which is why I recommend use of teeth and claw.

Why don't humans have proper hair?

And another thing. Humans don't have proper hair. They are, to put it baldly, more or less bald. If you look at them they look a bit like Chinese hairless dogs. There's a top knot of kinds, a bit of hair between the back legs, some under the front legs or armpits, and then a tiny scattering on the chest with the males. Males have a bit more body hair but their top knot goes manky in old age and sometimes vanishes altogether. Human hair also fades with age and eventually goes white. It seems to me absolutely mad to wear your hair at the crease where the leg meets the body. Most of us cats have a less hair there rather than more.
We cats vary, of course. There are the sleek short hairs like me, gleaming black all over except for a very tiny two or three white hairs on the chest. Then there are the long haired beauties like Catherine in the photo. And the semi-beauties like elderly William my companion. He is semi-longhaired with shorter tougher hairs on his back. Finally there are cats like Dragonheart (see last blog's comment from her domain at http://dragonheartsdomain.blogspot.com) who have no hair at all. She doesn't have ridiculous tufts of hair in her armpits. The result is far more beautiful than the bald but tufty humans.
The way feline hair varies is due to humans. They have selectively bred us for long, or no hair at all. They do this by restricting our right to choose partners over several generations. They bang up stud cats in a chalet to make them service females which are not chosen for them. Sounds good? Well it isn't because most of the stud cats sit around in their pens with nothing to do but occasional sex - no hunting, for instance, little human contact. It's a deprived life. They'd get much more sex, with partners they chose, if they were allowed out onto the tiles like the feral toms.
If humans can do this to cats, why on earth don't they selectively breed themselves for better hair? They would look far more attractive if they had short glossy fur all over their bodies like me, long hair like Catherine's or even be properly hairless all over like Dragonheart.
instead they have these pathetic tufts. They fuss endlessly about the tufts on their head. They brush, comb, fluff out, shave it all, cut it, dye it, condition it. But they're not willing breed selectively in order to develop nice glossy all over fur.
No sense at all.

Who's the cat addict? Is it love or is it addiction?

Cat hoarders are definitely cat addicts. But what the 'normal" cat carer like Celia. Is she an addict? Ronnie claims she is. He even wrote a book titled One Hundred Ways to Live with a Cat Addict. He claims she is obsessed with me and William and neglects him to care for us. He is particularly upset by the way she often leaves the marital bed half way through the night to come and sleep in my bed in the spare room. (I enjoy the compliment but I wish she wouldn't take up so much room.)
He claims she shows all the threefold signs of addiction - a mental obsession with cats (writing this blog for instance), an emotional attachment which means she hates leaving us for the day (like today when she is going to London), and a physical need to be cuddled by us (William really doesn't like this side of her).
I feel that her reactions are entirely proper and normal. She puts our welfare first as a good human servant should. She defers to us. She shops for the food we prefer. She looks after our simple physical needs. Cleans up the litter tray twice a day (important), grooms us daily (particularly William who is long haired), treats us regularly for fleas, treats us regularly for worms (we are both hunters), and vaccinates us each year. It's the least she should do. These are the duties of a human pet. I consider this nothing but our due.
OK so she thinks of us almost every five minutes. She fusses when I stay out late hunting. She gets anxious if she doesn't know where we are. She wants to cuddle us more than we want to cuddle her. There may be some dependancy in that but so what? Isn't that natural from an inferior species? This isn't and never could be an equal relationship.
It is not cat addiction. It is the proper behaviour between inferior human and superior cat.

The negligence of my personal staff

We cats expect a certain level of service from our humans. In return for our beauty and company, we expect doors open, regular meals , warm beds (which we are generous enough to share with them), and thoughtful personal service with proper attention health and safety. I am sorry to report that Celia has failed badly. She has been astonishingly negligent in her duties. She has failed to carry out a proper risk assessment of the garden shed. And she utterly forgot its obvious dangers to a healthy active cat (me). It happend early in the morning when she went out in her dressing gown to get the floating device for the garden pond - it stops the pond icing over and allows animals in the water to breathe because gases don't build up below the ice. If she had done a proper risk assessment she would have identified the high risk of my getting shut inside the shed. Obviously when she goes into the shed, I follow her - to check territory, to see if mice are living in the shed, and to make an assessment of whether there is anything else interesting there - spiders, frogs, wood lice and so forth. As is my wont, as could be expected by a better member of staff, I went in there and was nosing around. She shut the door on me without a thought. Worse still she walked off. I was there for three hours until Ronnie saw my angry face at the window and set me free. Worse still, I had not had time to perform my morning toilet in the nearby seed beds. So there was an ugly rush to the vegetable patch, a great deal of frantic digging, and I finally squatted down with enormous relief.
It was very emotionally upsetting. Tramatising even. I expected better of her. She is an unreliable woman and she is lucky that I didn't just leave home. I have not forgiven her.

Household staff - from kitchen maid to parlour maid

Another Sunday. Celia has come back from a Feline Advisory Conference and has decided William is under stress -- from me. To reduce competition around the kitche feeding station (I need more than he does because I am still growing and I am also greedier) she installed two extra feeding stations yesterday evening, one on the landing and one in our bedroom. That is the bedroom that I share (cats don't really share but we both use it) with William, one on each spare bed. This is a good idea. More food, as much as I like when I like, must be better. It gives me freedom to eat and how much (a lot) to eat. I feel no longer dependant on her putting down food for me. We cats like choices. So just to make the point, both William and I spurned the soft food she put down in the morning. We told her we had already had our breakfasts at the much more convenient hours of 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, 6am and 7am. We don't need her. As a kitchen maid she is now irrelevant to our lives. Her job is now elevated to that of parlour maid, ie of serving food in the three separate areas. Or should that be a housemaid, as two of the food bowls are now upstairs? I need a stately home cat to fill me in on the proper hierarchy of human servants. As for William, I can of course still elbow him out of the food bowls, only I shall have to try to keep an eye on all three. It is going to mean some strenuous running up and down stairs to do so.
Maybe hunting is more fun than bullying him. I hoped to bag another partridge yesterday but had no luck. I shall keep trying.