The tricky art of trapping a truculent cat
MY CAT is not talking to me at the moment. It’s not that he ever actually talks to me in the true sense of the word, but pet owners will know exactly what I mean.
He is having nothing whatsoever to do with me. He is giving me the cold shoulder. His fierce yellow eyes are staring through me, directly at a point about 10 feet behind me. His tail is twitching to highlight his fury. Just before I wrote that last sentence, I rubbed his eyebrow with my thumb just the way I know he likes it, but there was not even the slightest murmur of a purr from him.
Right now, he despises me, and I’m just going to have to live with it.
The reason is that I took him to the vet this morning for his annual jabs, and this is not something he enjoys. That is putting it mildly.
In the little consulting room with the sliding door, the vet remarked on how “chilled” Ron was as he settled himself down on the scales – that’s the cat, not the vet, on the scales. I let out a laugh, which must have seemed a bit rude, but the vet had not been there half an hour earlier, when I was trying to get Ron into his carrying box. It’s one of those sturdy plastic contraptions with a grille over the open end and a handle on the top.
There is ample room for him in the box, and to give him an extra level of comfort I had placed a carefully folded section of the Herald Express in there for him to sit on. The work of one of my fellow columnists was uppermost.
I enticed a none-the-wiser Ron indoors from the garden with snacks, waited until he had finished eating, and then picked him up. So far, so good, but the closer he got to the box the more awkward and growly he became, until he arrived at the aperture with all four paws sticking out in different directions.
It is not possible to insert a cat making that kind of shape into a cat box. I tried a little sleight of hand, swinging him quickly round so that I might be able to stuff him in backwards, but he was wise to that, and “star-fished” the limbs again so I couldn’t get him in. This is extremely clever behaviour, but somewhat annoying when the clock is ticking towards appointment time.
We made several approaches to the cat box in this manner over the course of the next few moments, with Ron becoming ever more awkward, sharp and violent each time. In the end, I decided that the only way to get him in was to trick him and impose my superior intellect.
I found more tiny snacks and put them on the floor. For a brief, but crucial, instant, his guard was down, at which point I pounced. I scooped him up, crunching a little biscuit and growling faintly at the same time – him, not me – and with one swift, sweeping and almost elegant manoeuvre lobbed him into the box, tail and backside first. The indignity of it! Before he had regained his composure enough to make an issue out of it again, I had clipped the gate across the opening and Ron was securely contained.
That’s when he started glaring at me, and apart from his “chilled” display at the surgery for the benefit of the vet, he hasn’t stopped glaring at me since. I’m not entirely sure how long this is going to go on.
‘So far, so good, but the closer he got to the box the more awkward and growly he became’