Tuesday, May 17, 2005

A love-hate relationship with fangs

I live with two cats. I think a lot of people live in multi-cat households, and they already know where this is going. Multi-cat households experience one of two general atmospheres:

1. mutual affection between the cats, lots of running around and chasing and wrestling, very little blood.

2. two or more cats who are rarely, if ever, in the same room at the same time, lots of running around and chasing and wrestling, copious amounts of howling and blood ensue.

For the 7 years that I have lived with these two cats, our situation has been closer to atmosphere #2. But something happened about a year and a half ago, and both of these cats became much more tolerant of each other. Both seem content to sleep in the living room at the same time, and I've even seen them eating on the same table (food: the great unifier). Everyone who knows them agrees that they seem like different cats. Happier. More friendly.

But I never expected this.



Miru and Milhouse, just hanging out on the bed, not fighting. Not hissing. Not making awful kitty howling noises. And this went on for about 10 minutes--I did, eventually, get sick of sitting on the floor and not wanting to disturb such allied feline tendencies by actually getting into bed.

Ozzy's jealous ways solved that problem. He jumped up onto the bed, Milhouse promptly leaped out of the way, and Miru proceeded to deliver his patented "Cobra Bite" (tm) to Ozzy's face.



The cat won, Ozzy left, I took advantage of all of the space available in bed now that there was only one additional animal, and got in bed. Everybody wins! Sort of. I win, anyway.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poppycock! Ozzy was not jealous- he didn't even want to get on the bed- you made him jump on the bed because you knew he would get bitten. Poor Ozzie!

Deborah said...

Nuts to that! Ozzy is his own dog. If I could make him do stuff (or rather, not do stuff), we wouldn't have a vari kennel outfitted with plexi-glass and ratcheting truck-bed-tie-down ropes in the spare room.