Pet peeves

We were at the vet's clinic this morning picking up Small Cat's medicines, when we met another small cat who needed medical care. She was younger than ours, just about nine months old, and sitting calmly in her basket, her tummy neatly wrapped in a bandage. She did not say much - ours would have yowled high opera or cowered and shivered - and did not flinch when I patted her gently on the head and gave her a feather I had found for Small Cat to play with. She just looked up at me, and blinked slightly rheumy eyes and lay back. Her family - an older lady with a girl in her maybe early 20s - were obviously very wrapped up in her condition, fussing gently and eagerly absorbing everything we had to say. After all, since we had had Small Cat for two years already, we were the experts, right?

It is only after you go through an experience that you realise how little you actually know, because then, when other people ask you the same questions you had before the experience, you understand the place you once came from. The lady's big concern was what we fed Small Cat. Her cat, you see, did not drink milk and refused to eat fish. We smiled. We knew what that was about. Small Cat had put us through the same worries, except that since I had been a cat owner before, I knew that the myths about cat-hood may have had some base in reality but, for the most part, they were really only stereotypes stretched into those myths. Cats do not always like milk. Cats do not always like fish. Cats do not always like the place and not the people. All myths.

Small Cat herself is a little spoiled brat, whose every whim and fancy is catered to, even if it means waking up and staggering blearily around the house at some unearthly hour of the night because she wants only her favourite biscuit and not what the dish has in it and she needs her paw held (in a manner of speaking) as she chews her ration-for-the-moment of a few stalks of wheat grass. I do not doubt that the little cat that we met this morning will be like Small Cat, indulged and pampered to the point where she takes her owners for granted and absorbs all the love and care she gets from them...and gives it all back with trust, ambushes from behind the door and lotsof biting and scratching. It is her catly right and duty, isn't it?