As I watched the various cats bop around the dining room this morning, I pondered how different they all are. Andy is an athlete with serious stamina. Olli is a rowdy frat boy type - athletic, but likely to get fat later. Dory is friendly, sensual, and trim but not terribly physical. And poor little Nazca is a whiner. He's fat, unathletic, and scared of everything.
The kittens are all from the same litter. But boy, are they different.
I have had some fine athletic cats in my lifetime. I can't decide who the most impressive is. Hoot was crazy strong. He had no problem jumping to the top of a door and perching there. But then Figaro would regularly jump up to the top of the fridge and from there bump up a ceiling tile to get into the kitchen. And they both had a quirky sense of humor. They were also both fast enough that you generally only got a blur when photographing them. Both would do really impressive somersaults when chasing those feather-string-stick toys. Hoot would do his somersaults pretty near the ceiling.
Andy may be the most impressive of them. He doesn't jump quite as high or move quite as fast, but he has the best endurance of any cat I've met. We got a mouse in the house about three years ago. JD and I gave up on it and went to bed after a couple of hours. Andy sat in the living room, waiting for the mouse. When I got up, he was still there, still watching. And less than an hour later he caught that mouse.
For a creature who normally sleeps most of the day, that's quite impressive. That's like me sitting up for four days and then running a sprint and wrestling a guy. Andy is the ace sniper of the cat world.
Possibly because of incidents like that, he is pretty weird about mice. If there is a mouse in the house, I usually don't find out until after the fact. He catches them, he eats their little feet, and then he puts them in the food bowl on top of the kibble. Gross! But demonstrative of the fact that mice are food to cats.
I don't know why the feet. I've been watching cats for thirty years and I have little more insight into their psycho little minds than I did when I was 11.
The other cats I've had (and man, I had lost track of how many there were) were: 1) Scoops, a truly exceptional hunter and magnificent bitch. She really deserves her own post. I will say that she killed animals larger than her, that she was far nicer to strangers than to me, that the way to catch her was to grit your teeth and hold out your arm for her to latch onto with all her points, and that her last act was to bite through my hand. 2) Batty, a complete nebbish. There was absolutely nothing spectacular about him. He caught pneumonia as a kitten and was never really healthy or strong after that. The one thing he did best in all the world was to love me. You don't have to be impressive to be wonderful. And finally 3) Trouble, about whom much has been said and written. He was Scoops' evil twin. He didn't care to hunt, to the extent that mice would run right in front of him. But he was definitely a magnificent bastard.
Ah, Trouble. Miss you, you old jerk.
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