She's leaving me.

She's leaving me. After all I have done for her - woken her up in the mornings nice and early, shared my bed with her, brought in mice for her to eat or chase (as she chooses only she doesn't). Now she is going off for a whole week deserting me, William and Ronnie. I am so upset I haven't bothered to blog a picture.
And - the cheek of it - she is deserting her post in order to study animal management. What sort of management is this! I extremely disappointed in her.

Is Celia having kittens? She smells of them. Bad, bad, bad.

Celia has been coming home smelling of kittens lately. I took careful sniff the other day and thought she had been handling about four of them. This is bad. Very bad. And her hands smelled not just of kittens but high quality kitten food. (I'd like some of it myself but I normally get adult food, which is not so rich.)
What on earth has she been up to? Fondling alien kittens is not what she is there for. Is she going to bring one home, I wonder. If so I definitely don't want it. I don't want any other cats of any kind at all ever. This is my territory and intruders are not welcome. William agrees with me - for once. He says it would be a second betrayal (what can he mean?) if she brings home a kitten. He hated it last time she did. Only then I realise that he is talking of my arrival in the household in the winter of 2006. Can't he see that this is completely different.
Further daily investigative smelling suggests that the number of kittens is falling, which is encouraging. Today she came home smelling of just one single kitten - Riley. I could tell (scent reveals so much) that he was small, ticked tabby, and quite frightened. Apparently she has been trying to help socialise four feral kittens by sitting in their pen and hand feeding them or playing with them with lengths of string. Riley (he's in the picture) is actually the nicest, but because he isn't as chubby and appealing to look at as the other three he has still not found a home.
I heard her telling Ronnie that after about eight visits, Riley was able to eat from her hand while sitting in her lap. Today she came back and she had been able to pick him up. He had purred loudly and rolled over to have his tummy tickled. She says she almost cried - she was so moved. He'll probaby always be a nervous cat with strangers (unlike me) but he will be wonderful for the human he loves. She promised Ronnie, who is presenting a united front with me and William, that she is not going to bring him home. No more cats are wanted here. Me and William are not dogs. We are not social animals. We don't want a pack of kittens, nor even a single extra one.
Pity the kittens couldn't have been like me. I was socialised by Cats Protection then handled by 24 different people in my first month with Celia - the postman, the man who delivers parcels, the passing farm manager, visitors, Tracy, Paul, Steffi, and many others. As a result I like humans a lot. William who is nervous and standoffish, says that I am like the school tart - I am anybody's. He is jealous, of course.

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.

Black is beautiful - and superior for survival

This is me up a tree doing my leopard act. I want to grow up to be a black panther like Bagheera. I used to think I could catch birds this way. Nowadays I just do it to amuse and alarm Celia. She stands underneath saying "Pleeeeease George, come down." She remembers when I climbed up as a tiny kitten one frosty December day, and was only rescued when a passing Human Hero got off his tractor, climbed up 30 feet, grabbed me and climbed down using only one hand.
My colour - black is called melanistic by scientists - may give me superior health and survival skills. Stephen O Brien (see earlier blog on 7/2/07) and Eduardo Eizirik, of the Cat Genome Project at the US National Cancer Institute have tracked down the melanism gene in 11 of the cat species. I have it in common with black panthers (melanistic leopards) and jaguars and jaguarundis. "Perhaps the selective pressure that allowed these mutations to survive in cats may not be camouflage. Perhaps the mutations cause resistance of the cats to bugs," O'Brien told Reuters in 2004.
Interestingly many stray cats are black or black and white. It is theorised that this happens because humans dislike black and therefore are more likely to adopt "pretty' strays - tabbies or tabbies and white like my elderly companion William. They just leave the black kittens to grow up wild and hungry. (Honestly, there is so much to dislike about humans. Colour prejudice is one of their more disagreeable traits.) And the black cats stay longer in rescue establishments because nobody wants them.
But maybe there are more of us on the streets partly because we survive better. I ought to try to contact the Italians who are holding Black Cat Day in November (see blog 8/27/07) to tell them this. We black cats are lucky not unlucky. Black power rules in catland.

My ten things a cat dislikes about humans

Here are the ten most irritating things about my humans.
1. They keep wanting my attention when I am busy. Why don't they fit in better with my schedule? They wake me up when I am sleeping or napping. Or pick me up when I am hunting.
2. Celia takes up too much room in my bed. Why can't she sleep on the sofa?
3. She varies her own mealsbut she expects me to eat the same food more or less till the packet is finished.
4. She wants to hug and cuddle me. I don't mind a bit of a cuddle but she would do it all day if she could. She has no restraint. It is cuddle harassment.
5. She won't let me eat from the butter dish.
6. Humans keep vocalising on and on and on and on. They don't understand body language and they are more or less smell blind. Dumb (in the mental sense) creatures. Their hearing isn't up to much. They can't hear mice footfalls like I can.
7. They have things. Possessions. I live light - just me and my four paws, razor sharp claws and teeth, and sleek fur. They fuss about things a lot of the time.
8. They take away the mice I bring into the house and they don't even eat them. What a waste. Celia even screamed at the rat I brought in.
9. They sleep at the wrong time of day - ie night. And they wake all through the day. I like a long midday rest, an early dawn start and a dusk to midnight hunting schedule. But they lure me in before midnight and lock the cat flap.
10.They really don't understand me.... which accounts for much of my blog.
What do you hate about humans?

PS. This is a picture of Cusco - don't you like his tooth!