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contract between humans and cats
Monday, December 3 2007
Several weeks ago, when I stepped up seasonal wood burning in the wood stove, the living room became a prime lounge for the household cats, particularly Wilma and Clarence, as well as Eleanor the Dog. (For some reason our elderly cat "the Baby" Marie has decided to keep to the relatively cold upstairs bedroom, a pattern she began in the heat of summer.) At about that same time, I started encountering puzzling instances of poor bathroom training by one (or plausibly more) of our cats.
It's essential to note at this point that cats are perhaps the easiest creatures to potty train. All one has to do is present a cat (or tiny kitten) with a box full of sand (or any grainy substance, more on that in a bit) and from then on all of that cat's excreta, both liquid and solid (but not, unfortunately, vomit), will end up in that box, usually buried so no one has to look at it.
But one of the cats, and I can't be sure which one, had started leaving turds in various non-box parts of the living room. The preferred siting for these had been on small throw rugs or a shaggy pet bed. At first it had just been poop, but then one day I noticed a wet spot in the middle of the pet bed. I began referring to the culprit as "the Mad Pooper," and wondered what could be done.
Not wanting to have to deal with cleaning up a throw rug every morning, I brought a litter box out to the living room and it became the preferred toilet for the Mad Pooper. As with his throw-rug besmirchments, the Mad Pooper preferred leaving his or her excreta uncovered, just lying there as a series of logs connected together by narrow isthmi.
Gretchen didn't want to have a box of cat litter in the living room, so I tried to gradually move it towards the laundry room (where the litter boxes normally reside). But one night I moved it too far. Evidently it was missed by the Mad Pooper after a 12 foot march to the north and he or she resumed crapping on throw rugs.
So who exactly is the Mad Pooper? It's difficult to say, though it probably isn't "the Baby" Marie, who is frequently seen scampering off to the litter box in the laundry room. It's also not Julius (aka Stripey). He'd been the chief suspect (mostly because Gretchen likes him the least) so one night we'd locked him in the laboratory with food, water, and a litter box, giving him the perfect alibi when the Mad Pooper struck again.
I agree with Gretchen that the Mad Pooper is probably one of the outdoor cats, one who has perhaps become accustomed to pooping outdoors. Now that it's cold, all the cats go outside much less. If this theory is true, then the Mad Pooper is not Wilma (who never wants to go outside, even in the summer, and is the only cat who never bothered to learn how to use the pet door). This leaves Clarence and Sylvia, and I'm inclined to believe it's Clarence because of what happened today.
Gretchen had been doing some kitchen reorganizing and, as part of repackaging of bulk foods, she'd set out a large bowl full of white rice on the kitchen's center island. At some point this evening she wandered into the kitchen and saw that the Mad Pooper had hit again, this time leaving a chain of logs lying uncovered in the center of that bowl of rice. Horrifying as that was to discover, at least this time the Mad Pooper was adhering better to the contract between humans and cats. After all, dry rice is the perfect cat litter, and there it was, piled several inches deep in a large container. For all the world it had looked to the Mad Pooper like a premium litter box.
The cat most likely to be seen on the kitchen's center island is Wilma; she jumps up there frequently during the course of a day. But, as I said, she's been an exclusively-indoor cat and knows where the litter box is. Clarence, on the other hand, is known to jump up on the kitchen sink to find pools of water to drink, and it's possible that while he was there he spied the bowl of rice only a three-foot-horizontal-jump away and said to himself, "Is that what I think it is? How convenient!"
I'm sure you're wanting to know whether or not Gretchen threw all that rice away even though the turd had been laid gently atop it all, not penetrating any deeper than one or two grains. Most people would fall into the camp demanding that it all be thrown out. But there are also arguments to be made for keeping some or even most of it. The contamination, after all, had mostly been psychological, and any bacteria that might have reached any particular grain would be killed by our trusty rice cooker. But you'll never know for sure; I've been sworn to secrecy concerning the truth of what ended up happening to all that rice.
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