Such a cute little kitty
I don’t make a secret of the fact that I’m a dog lover, and not so much a cat lover. I think I understand the appeal of cats, and I certainly understand and respect that Leah is far more a cat lover than a dog lover. So I have tried to accommodate, if not welcome our cat overlords.
But Zoe has stressed my accommodative powers, weak as they are, to the limit.
Zoe is affectionate only under very limited circumstances. If he’s hungry, he will purr and rub up against your leg. He looks and sounds oh, so affectionate. So you put his food down, he eats a little, and he walks away. Once you have served your purpose, you are no longer a part of his universe. One time he escaped from my truck at my mother’s house and disappeared for two weeks. I helped Leah search for him, and we eventually found him hiding under a neighbor’s deck. When we took him to my mother’s house, he was absolutely in love with Leah, me and my mother. For a while. And then we fed him.
He lies on the couch with us sometimes as we watch television, but that’s just a coincidence. He was going to lie there anyway. He does not seek out petting or cuddling; in fact, he actively rejects it.
“Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side.”
So the first problem is that he provides no emotional benefit to Leah, his loving owner. She tries. Oh, yes, she tries. But it does no good. He is just not interested.
The second problem is that he’s a mean cat with the other cats. He bites them and jumps on them and generally gives them a hard time. Based on my observations of some of the other cats, that’s not particularly unusual, but in his case, it seems to be more than purely feline instinct. He seems to pretty much just hate everyone.
The third, and most severe problem, is that he’s mean with Leah. He’s a biter. A few years ago he bit Leah on the arm, and she ended up with an infection severe enough that she had to make daily visits to an urgent care facility for antibiotic injections (in the butt) for a week. She was so sick for the first visit that she had to call a friend to take her to the doctor.
And then, almost a year to the day, Zoe bit her again. This time she ended up in the hospital for IV antibiotics.
And now the fourth problem, the one that precipitated this post: It’s his bathroom habits. It’s not just that he spends all day outside and then comes in to use his litter box. It’s not just that he tracks litter everywhere in the house; I know that’s a problem for many cat owners. It’s not even that he seems to make a circuit of the entire house to make sure there’s litter in every room. The real problem is that he is apparently oblivious to his own excrement once it leaves his body. He steps into the littler box, squats, pees, and then turns around and walks directly through it to leave the box. So he walks around with wet litter on his feet, spreading in throughout the house.
That’s not the worst of it. The worst is that he does the same thing with his poop. Last night, when he came into our bedroom and plopped onto the floor, his hind feed had poop on them. Our bedroom is the only room in the house with carpet, and the only place I walk barefoot. So I (we) walk across a carpet that has cat pee and poop residue on it.
And sometimes he jumps up on our bed to nap. He likes to lie on my side.
I have said to Leah in the past that Zoe is not fit to be an inside cat. It’s not that I don’t like cats. He’s just too mean and too dangerous and too dirty to have inside. I have suggested that she get a good cat, one that will be affectionate and, possibly, hopefully, reasonably competent at using a litter box. Maybe even one that likes to ride in a car with us. But Leah has had Zoe for around 10 years and can’t think of him as anything but the cat she wishes he was. She doesn’t want to just toss him outside, never to come in again.
To be fair, there are some considerations about this. He is on a special diet (no, not human arms) because of his delicate digestive tract. He has to eat canned food, and the other cats would eat it all if we fed him outside. He has to have eyedrops twice a day for his glaucoma, and that’s a two-person job (if one is not a lion tamer) and one most easily accomplished inside on a countertop. With newspaper spread to keep his feet off the countertop. So if we did toss him outside — I mean if we set him free to be the outdoor cat he is truly meant to be — we would probably have to bring him inside sometimes. Under careful supervision, and without access to a litter box.
So that’s out little dilemma.
That’s my view on the subject. Now heeeeere’s Leah!
I will admit that he’s the cat from hell*, but I just can’t toss him out to become an outdoor cat. I really shouldn’t care, I don’t guess, but I do, and I don’t know why. This has been a problem through our marriage, and we wish and hope that we can resolve it. If anyone has any advice, please feel free to give it.
* Mark again. Zoe was found as a tiny kitten wandering in the parking lot at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. We don’t know who his mother was, but I have often said that his father was the devil.
The problem with cats is that there just aren’t any good recipes for them!
I know that wild bird lovers (and even folks like quail hunters) strongly object to letting house cats roam freely outside. Apparently the wild bird population is suffering in large part to cat predation.
We are dog people as well, but we had a cat for many years, and our experience was much the same (though, oddly, the cat loved me for some reason). The mess, the smell, the aloofness. As things go, the cat lived a long time, eventually got sick, and had to be put to sleep since it was in misery.
Since our area is a dumping ground for unwanted pets, we have five stray cats living mostly outside. Our big dog Zeke was also dumped up here. Fortunately for the wildlife, only one of the cats is a killer. I do my best to keep that from happening, but it still does occasionally. Zoe is far too lazy to chase a bird or even a lizard, although he might close his mouth if one crawled inside.
It’s really a shame that on top of all of his messiness and illnesses, he is a bit of a mean-spirited critter. That does make it hard to simply love him, with all that biting and fighting. But once you love an animal, it is difficult to cast them out. It wouldn’t even be with indifference, but with generous heartfelt angst. The heart doesn’t close when the mind makes a decision, and that’s why we let animals rule our lives because our hearts have opened to them.
Yeah, I agree with Robin – the biting is unusual for a cat you’ve had since he was a kitten, and must be especially distressing given the consequences. We’ve never had a biter among the many, many cats we’ve had, so I don’t have any real suggestions, other than to try to identify and avoid the situations that lead to that.
His bathroom habits are also hard to deal with. If he’s blocked from moving forward out of the litter box, make sure he can do so so he doesn’t turn around. Of course, if he’s a coverer, he’ll turn around and around anyway. Sounds though like he’d be the kind that just leaves it on top of the litter. Maybe try changing the litter type? I don’t know – we have our own problems with a couple of our cats that just seem insolvable.
Is there a single room in the house that he could be confined to, for the most part?
Robin – I think Leah would agree with you, once you start loving one of them, you can’t really stop. I know it would be hard to deal with this kind of problem in one of the dogs I have had.
Wayne – We have begun to suspect that Zoe has some problems with pain (arthritis maybe?) and he seems to be going blind (possibly because of the glaucoma). Those might contribute to his mean disposition. But the times he bit Leah he was not eating and was aware that Leah was there. He was lying on the floor and she was basically just petting him when he turned and bit without warning. He does the same kind of thing with Chloe, the first stray that showed up with her kittens. He nuzzles and she nuzzles and everything seems fine, and then he just bites the hell out of her.
On the litter front, he sometimes tries to cover his business, but often he reaches outside of the litter box and scrapes on the floor. His routine is to step into the litter box, squat right there, and then turn and leave, walking right over whatever he just deposited. We have tried different litter and it doesn’t seem to help. We keep the litter box in the laundry room, and have been occasionally confining him in there overnight. We aren’t sure exactly how we’re going to deal with it.
Our two cats were both strays. One was much more approachable and affectionate than the other when they lived outdoors. Eventually, we were able to move the more affectionate cat indoors permanently. Then, we managed to coax the other cat to use a “doggie door” to come inside to eat and get out of inclement weather, but she was a feral cat at heart. One day, I blocked the doggie door when the feral cat was inside and she became an indoor cat too, united once again with her former outdoor companion. They got along great–except that the feral half of the pair remained feral to the day she died. She came to tolerate the presence of Kali and me in the same room with her (that took many months), but she never allowed either of us to touch her even though she lived with us several years. Most people–even cat lovers–wouldn’t tolerate this sort of foolishness but, as Robin Andrea intimated–once we were committed to her, she was part of our family and we tried to communicate as much affection as she would accept.
The lack of returned affection from all of our cats — we have six in all — is the biggest problem I see. Leah really loves cats, but these cats don’t really return it. Smokey and Chloe are the most affectionate, but the rest of them mostly just tolerate a little petting, if that. Except Zoe, who sometimes bites in return.
There is much to say, but I’ll limit my reply to Mark’s observation that Zoe could be in pain. I actually thought of this.
He has quite a few health issues, so it wouldn’t be too surprising that he might have chronic pain. Check the purring – cats also purr when they’re in pain.
Regardless, I think the thing is this: A stroke or two with a difficult cat is fine; continued absent-minded stroking is not. Thoughts that cats love belly skritching are just beyond me. I’ve never had a cat that liked you to stroke, rub, or scratch its belly, and I’ve had 35 cats over the last four decades. None has been able to tolerate a pass at the belly with comfort,
I think the situation may be this: cats face away from you not because they’re arrogant, but because they’re comfortable that you have their back. It’s so easy to understand.
Cats roll over on their backs, not to invite scritching, but to indicate that they trust you will not take advantage. I’ve seen this so many times it could not be clearer. (It’s opposite to the submissive gesture a dog will give you, inviting a belly scritch.) I’m not justifying it, just saying, and thinking that maybe a lot of folks don’t realize it.