Published: May 19, 2008 11:31 pm            

Cathie Shaffer: Chaos comes to my house: 5/20/08

We — being the dog and me — have had a kitten in the house for two weeks now. The dog loves having the company; I’m simply trying to remain sane through the experience.

It’s been more than 20 years since I adopted a kitten. I’ve discovered it’s like having kids — you remember the good stuff about raising them and forget the bad.

When we brought Tabby home, she was a sweet six-week-old bundle of fluff, content to lay in a lap and purr.

Time changes things. She’s two weeks older now and the epitome of confidence. There is nothing too high to climb on or too low to go under for this fearless feline.

Nor is she intimated by a dog a hundred times her size. She knows Maggie is a big old baby, and she thinks she can get away with anything she wants.

She’s wrong. Even in my fairly free-wheeling household, we have rules, and the dog knows them all. Not only that, Maggie is a big tattletale.

Case in point: I’m in the kitchen washing dishes. I hear Maggie’s “someone’s gonna get it” bark and head for the living room. The kitten has stepped onto the top of the television from our open staircase, and Maggie is going nuts at such a blatant disregard for the rules.

Maggie’s “look what the cat’s doing” bark is different from the one she uses when someone’s at the door, there’s a scary noise in the night or she needs to make an urgent trip to the back yard. And if her announcement is ignored, she’ll come running to fetch an authority figure before the bad behavior ends.

Tabby doesn’t seem to realize she’s living with a snitch. She looks up with the gaze of the innocent from the curtains she’s attempting to climb, the wastebasket she’s just tipped over or the potted plant that’s just too tempting.

Living with Maggie is like having a toddler. She obeys simple commands, likes to go bye-bye and is thrilled when strangers say hello. She doesn’t seem to realize cats aren’t like dogs, and Tabby isn’t going to respond to “leave it” and “sit!” like she does. So when Tabby does something unacceptable in our household, like walk across the coffee table, Maggie waits for me to yell.

I do believe, though, that she’s coming to realize training a kitten consists mostly of saying “no” and smacking one gently on the nose. She’s watched me do it, my kids do it, my grandgirls do it and now, she’s trying it, too. At least I think that’s what she’s doing when a big paw comes out and stops poor little Tabby in her tracks.

On occasion, Maggie gets to playing a little too hard with Tabby, and we have to chastise her, which can lead to unexpected circumstances. A few days ago, the noise on the couch attracted my attention and in my best stern-mommy voice, I shouted “Enough!”

Maggie promptly stopped with the kitten and sat — right on poor Tabby.

Kittens are quite resilient, and the experience didn’t hurt her a bit. It may, however, have inspired her latest discovery of how to bug a dog — hiding in the bathtub, behind an open door or underneath the dining room table and launching an all-out attack on the dog’s furry tail as she walks by.

CATHIE SHAFFER can be reached at cathieshaffer@zoominternet.net or (606) 473-9851.

        

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