Cats-A User’s Guide Part 4

If you’ve been following these User’s Guides (and if you haven’t, why not?), you’ll have read how hard it is to get a cat into a container, for example a pet carrier, that it doesn’t want to go in. I once made a mistake and bought a cardboard pet carrier for Snotbag. Seemed an all right thing to do, fairly eco-friendly, recycled cardboard, when it get worn recycle it again.

Cardboard is no match for a cat in a strop. Snotbag clawed her way out on the way to the vet, and dashed around the car yowling and getting under the pedals.

But here’s the true Snotbag at work. My then wife used to buy a lot of shoes. I mean a lot of shoes; Imelda Marcos had trouble keeping up. Shoes come in boxes, don’t they? With nice crunchy tissue paper in them?

So we have a shoe fashion parade, and suddenly become aware of a rustling. There’s Snotbag hunkered down in the box. But since ex wife had size 3 feet, the boxes weren’t very big. Snotbag, on the other hand, was.

I don’t mean she was fat. If you could get anywhere near her, you’d find that you could feel her ribs, and even in her dotage she never developed the feline saggy belly. But she was long in the body and legs, and quite exceptionally furry, with a ruff on her neck that made me suspect some Maine coon somewhere in her background.

Now if I’d tried to get long legged, long bodied, furry Snotbag into a size 3 shoebox, I’d have ended up needing a blood transfusion and corrective surgery. Left to her own devices, she’d squeeze as much of herself into this tiny box, and be quite content to let the bits that wouldn’t fit – her head for one thing, and her tail for another, and that was long and resembled a very big test tube brush – hanging out. Then she’d purr, which indicates contentment in cats, and contentment was not Snotbag’s ground state.

Bless her.