Blue, Bettina and I attended a canine event in Gardiner , Maine
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| Looks perfectly harmless, right? |
The vet had some papers and some information about canine weight
loss on the table. Bettina was desperate
to get to the other side of this table and for the life of me I couldn’t figure
out why. Soon she was barking her fool
head off. I thought at first, she was
barking at the vet. But she was
not. After several rounds of barking she
tried to jump up on the table. I pulled
her back several times and scolded her.
She was not dissuaded.
The human vet and the human mumma are most definitely not
sight hounds. So we can be forgiven for
the fact that it wasn’t until her second or third attempt to gain the summit of
the table that we figured out what was so important to her. I had not noticed it before, but the vet had
3-4 pieces of fur sitting at the back of the table. They looked like cat hides and at first I was
a little horrified thinking he had skinned some cats and saved their
skins.
It wasn’t as gruesome as that but nearly so. In fact, they were ‘cat mats.’ This is a term I had never heard of before
but apparently if a long haired cat goes un-groomed and gets too matted, the only
solution is to shave the poor thing down.
What gets shaved off is a cat rug the size of the feline in
question.
I felt a little sad for any cats that ended up in this
condition. On the table was evidence of
at least 4 cats who had ended up that way.
What was puzzling to me, however, is why anyone would want to save such
a thing. Maybe you save ONE as a
cautionary tale to other cat owners. But
saving four of them? That’s a
collection. That indicates a hobby. These ‘cat mats’ weren’t in the shape of the
Virgin Mary or anything. There wasn’t
anything special about them that I could see.
It went from strange to truly bizarre when the vet informed
me that at least one of them was 15 years old.
Someone saved a giant mat of cat fur for more than a decade! As I was pondering this, the vet took the
rattiest of the four mats and held it out at Bettina level.
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| Bettina, just before "the incident" |
Ole Lightning Fussypants did not look a crazy gift vet in
the mouth. She grabbed that nasty piece
of fur so quickly that neither the vet nor I actually saw it happen. The next thing we knew, she was shaking that
ancient cat hair for all she was worth.
It must have smelled very cattish because she seemed convinced it could
and should be killed.
I did have to agree with her on that one point, it should
have been killed. But the vet was of
another opinion. He started yelling that
I should not let her rip it and other things I wasn’t paying attention to as I
wrestled Bettina for her prize. She was
so in the cat killing zone that she just chomped on that fur fast and hard,
paying no attention to my fingers that had been jammed into her mouth in an
effort to pry her jaws open.
I was eventually successful in prying open her mouth and
grabbing the soggy, nasty old cat fur back, but not before she flattened
several fingers between her molars. I
threw the thing back at the vet and he spent a little time petting and primping
it before he replaced it with the other three.
He gave me a wry smile and said, “Huh. She’s high prey.”
I took a moment to formulate my response as I massaged some
blood back into my crushed fingers. I
decided that the response that would get me in the least amount of trouble was,
“Yes. Yes she is.”
“I guess I shouldn’t have held that out for her to
sniff.”
Again I took a moment to mentally edit my response in the
interests of politeness. “No. No you shouldn’t have.”
