For the first time, the Budster has a patch of matted fur. Luckily, because this is a frequent problem for cats, there’s a lot of detailed advice out there about what to do.
Ruh roh!
In a first for him, Bud’s got a patch of matted fur. While it’s clear he understands I’m trying to help him, he’s not particularly keen on my efforts to comb it out.
He’ll tolerate limited brushing, but after a few attempts he pulls away. I don’t think it’s a sore spot in general. He hasn’t minded when I examined the area and he doesn’t pull away if I scratch his lower back, but his limited tolerance for the brush and his body language all say he’s uncomfortable with repeated attempts to clear the fur.
The dandruffy stuff is from the combing and looks like dead skin. His coat is normally clear of anything like that.
The mat is hard, like the bristles of a paint brush that hasn’t been cleaned properly. Bud’s white underfur is much more visible in the matted area as it sticks up.
After reading about matting in cats and the causes, I don’t think we’re dealing with fleas or an infection. I realize indoor cats can get fleas, but I very rarely see the little guy scratching himself and there’s no indication he’s in any general discomfort.
My best guess is that he’s, ahem, maybe still a little too much on the chubby side and can’t groom the area as he did when he was a younger, slimmer feline, before he moved down to Florida, joined the Del Boca Vista retirement community for cats and immersed himself in the exciting world of bocce.
As you can see, he doesn’t look chubby and his coat is otherwise very healthy.
He’s a tiger!
Of course any talk of weight issues is very hush-hush around here. Officially, Buddy has the physique of an athletic tiger. Anyone who vocalizes doubts about that does so at their peril.
Right now my plan of attack is to get a fine metal comb specifically for jobs like this. I’ll try to remedy it with short brushing sessions and encouragement in the form of treats and praise for Bud being such a brave little guy.
If that doesn’t work, the next step would be a groomer or veterinarian. These things don’t resolve themselves, unfortunately, and the longer they’re allowed to persist, the worse the problem becomes.
The challenges of getting a lazy cat interested in play time and toys again.
Buddy is friendly, outgoing and incredibly vocal, but he’s always been a bit lazy.
His preferred method of getting down from the couch isn’t jumping — although he does jump sometimes — it’s slowly oozing off the cushion like he’s liquid, taking the path of least resistance and letting gravity do all the work until he drops down and lands with a “Mmmrrrrrppp!”
When we wake up, the first thing he does is demand a snack, then he lays down for First Nap, apparently because the act of chewing and swallowing is so demanding.
“Now’s an excellent time for a nap.”
While he used to chase the laser with a fury and jump several times his own height to paw at it — even after figuring out it’s light fired out of a pen held by me — nowadays he can’t be bothered. At best he halfheartedly chases it for a bit and then loses interest even though I make an effort to move the laser like prey, as I do with his wand toys.
Worst of all, catnip makes him even lazier because he doesn’t just sniff the damn stuff, he eats it. I try to get him interested in his favorite wand toy when he’s buzzing on a heady combination of ‘nip and silver vine, but he won’t chase it. He just rolls onto his back and paws at it lazily, maybe getting in a few “rabbit kicks” if he’s feeling feisty.
All of this would be funny if he wasn’t about to turn 10 years old and if he didn’t tip the scale at about a pound and a half to two pounds above his normal body weight when the vet weighed him a few months ago.
“Hey fat boy!” I tell him, getting the familiar “Brrrrrr!” in response. (He’s a big time triller. Feline linguists estimate at least 60 percent of the Buddinese dialect consists of trills of various pitch, length and intensity.)
Fat Boy lost most of the excess weight during a particularly brutal stretch when he screeched at me for snacks constantly and I had to deny him most of the time. At least with kids you can explain things to ’em. I’ve got no way of communicating to the Budster that he’s a Chubster.
Since then he’s put some of the weight back on, so I’ve gotta do something.
Here’s my plan:
Training him to do new tricks. He already knows come, stop, sit and high-five, so we’re gonna have to try something new, like teaching him to roll and maybe teaching him to jump on my shoulder and “ride” around with me. Training is mentally stimulating, it should be fun for him, and it lays the groundwork for more challenging tricks.
A cat obstacle course! I can rig something up with his tunnel, some boxes and some “hazards” that he must traverse in order to get his paws on some catnip.
Snacks dispensed via puzzle feeder only. None of that free-feeding when he gavones the stuff down like he’s starving.
Rotating toys. Admittedly I haven’t been very good about doing that. Almost every guide mentions rotating cat toys so your little buddies don’t get tired of them.
A mirror so he can see how ripped chubby he’s gotten. He really needs to see himself loafing. It’s not pretty.
Okay that last one is a joke, mostly because I’m pretty sure he’ll just admire his “meowscles” in the mirror. Cats are masters of self deception. Bud is scared of rustling paper bags and absolutely terrified of vacuums, yet he still thinks he’s a hulking tiger. That’s impressive cognitive dissonance.
This is by far the fattest-looking photo of Buddy I could find. He’s in a super-meatloaf pose here, looking like a chonkmaster.
So we shall embark on this grand endeavor, and I’ll report back here to catalog successes and failures. Hopefully more of the former.
Buddy will always be like a baby to me, and I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that he’s now a “senior” cat, but he is and it’s on me to make sure he remains active so he hopefully lives at least another 10 years in good health. There are many adventures yet to be had, many more schemes for world domination to hatch, and more turkey to eat.
People who were asked to identify feline moods based only on audio of meows fared the worst in the study.
A new study suggests people misinterpret their cats’ moods often, but offers an easy fix.
A group of researchers from Paris Nanterre University split participants into three groups: one that was shown soundless video and images of cats, a second group that heard audio-only recordings of feline vocalizations, and a third group that had the benefit of video and sound.
Participants from the first two groups misinterpreted feline moods as much as 28 percent of the time, the study found, but people who had the benefit of seeing and hearing cats correctly identified their mental state almost 92 percent of the time.
The study also yielded another insight: people are much better at accurately assessing positive moods than they are at spotting an upset or antagonistic cat.
Credit: Sami Aksu/Pexels
The findings indicate we’re better off giving our cats our full attention than, say, jumping to conclusions about what they want based solely on their vocalizations or the position of their tails. It seems obvious, but how many of us have our eyes on a screen or we’re multitasking when our cats want our attention?
Of 630 people who participated in the research, 166 were professionals in animal-related fields like veterinary medicine and animal behaviorism, while the rest were lay people. There was a major gender imbalance among participants, with 574 women, 51 men and five people who didn’t identify with either gender.
It’s not clear how such an imbalance might skew the results, and it would be nice to see follow-up research evenly split between women and men.
If cats are like small children emotionally and intellectually, is it ethical to give them a mind-altering drug?
That’s a question posed in a new article in The Conversation, and it’s something I’ve never really considered before.
It’s generally accepted that our little buddies are more or less equivalent to small children in terms of intellect and emotional intelligence. In fact kittens develop much more quickly than human children and come to certain understandings — like theory of mind and object permanence — considerably earlier than young kids do.
They also seem to possess some sapient qualities. My niece was born a year before Bud, for example, but in their early interactions he understood she was still developing motor skills and did not intend to cause him harm. I have photos of a young Buddy, still a kitten, cautiously allowing her to touch his fur and being uncharacteristically gentle with her.
There’s growing evidence that pet cats are “kittens in perpetuity.” Not only do their behaviors toward us mirror their behaviors toward their mothers — like meowing and using us as a “secure base” when faced with uncertainties — but they depend on us completely. We care for them, in turn, at least in part because they have neotenous (baby-like) features, which trigger our protective instincts.
Bud is basically a “kid,” so is it ethical for me to give him a potentially mind-altering substance?
Catnip isn’t really a drug
While some catnip companies lean into the whole “marijuana for cats” thing, naming catnip after famous marijuana strains, selling it in gag pharmaceutical bottles and even calling themselves “dispensaries,” those are marketing efforts aimed at us servants. As the authors note, it’s not accurate to consider catnip the equivalent of a drug.
It’s not physically addictive, its effects only last a few minutes and cats can’t overdose on the stuff. In fact the primary “danger” of giving too much catnip is your four-legged friend getting desensitized completely to the effect, which is why it’s an occasional treat, not a routine pick-me-up.
Meowijuana Catnip Company really leans into the whole “weed for cats” thing with catnip packaged like marijuana.
Catnip “won’t induce psychosis and won’t lead to addiction or withdrawal symptoms,” wrote authors Anne Quain, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Sydney, and Mia Cobb, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Animal Welfare Science center.
We don’t have to worry about cats driving on the stuff, and they have no responsibilities to speak of so catnip and silver vine can’t impact important decisions. If they have any deleterious social effects, they end at making our furry friends drool, look silly and rendering them even more drowsy than usual.
The mysteries of the nip effect
But what about a kitty’s subjective experience? How does catnip make your feline overlord feel?
We don’t have a very good answer to that question other than what we can observe, which is that they love the stuff. (Some cats don’t respond to catnip but are put in a state of bliss by silvervine. Some respond to both. A small number may not derive much pleasure from either of the plants.)
Even when they aren’t technically impacted by it, cats seem intrigued by the scent and use their secondary olfactory receptor, the vomeronasal organ, to do that odd-looking “mouth-sniffing” thing they do.
Buddy loves catnip and silver vine. I keep his ‘nip in an out-of-reach cabinet, inside a sealed container, which is itself inside an air-tight plastic bag. Bud can be in a deep sleep yet within seconds of opening it he’ll appear like an overly enthusiastic djinn who thinks the wish thing works in reverse, meowing impatiently and trilling with anticipation as I set the good stuff down for him.
That’s as close to consent as we’re going to get from cats, and I think we can safely conclude Bud’s response is “Hell yes! Gimme that sweet ‘nip and silver vine blend!”
He gobbles the stuff down, by the way, so YMMV on your feline overlord’s reaction. The conventional wisdom is that cats who sniff catnip get more animated while cats who eat it tend to roll around in bliss and meow.
Making life more interesting for your fuzzy liege lord
Which brings us to the final point: catnip and silver vine are ultimately enrichment tools that help make indoor life more exciting for our little buddies, like toys, cat furniture, boxes, intriguing smells and most importantly, time playing with us.
We don’t talk about it enough, but keeping our cats stimulated and happy indoors is important, especially as pressure mounts for everyone to keep their felines inside. If your local area isn’t enforcing curfews and outright bans, it seems only a matter of time before they follow states in Australia, New Zealand and Europe in passing new laws. Every day there are news articles detailing the efforts of city councils and town boards to deal with outdoor, unmanaged feline populations, and it’s a safe bet that most of those elected officials will not have the welfare of the animals high on their list of priorities.
If we want to avoid cruelty toward cats, getting our own pets comfortable with living indoors is a good first step to making sure government doesn’t become involved.
The promise of a revolutionary new method of claw trimming is all hype, sadly.
I was hyped when I saw the headline.
“Cat Owners Rejoice,” the Newsweek headline blares. “Science Can Make Trimming Claws Less Stressful.”
Well if cat owners are rejoicing, it’s gotta be amazing, yeah?
I imagined cat affionados feting the creator of some miraculous new device that keeps cats comfortably restrained and relaxed, or maybe celebrating the discovery of some previously-unknown sound frequency that lulls felines into such a state of carefree bliss that they purr contentedly while we carefully clip their claws.
What I didn’t expect was a “protocol” that amounts to: Touch your cat’s leg. If he doesn’t try to murder you, touch your cat’s paw. If he still doesn’t murder you, trim a single claw. Repeat steps the next time your cat is in an agreeable mood.
That’s it. That’s the revolutionary new method that “science” made for us, according to Newsweek. “Science” must be proud of itself!
With this wonderful new method I should be able to trim one of Bud’s paws by 2067.
Obviously this is not science. It’s a method, not research. It’s well-intentioned and designed to keep cats comfortable, and those are noble goals, but calling it “science” is misleading, just like every other dumb headline that asserts “science says” or something is true “according to science,” as if science is an omniscient entity lounging on pillows, being fed candied figs by worshipful attendants and occasionally dispensing little nuggets of wisdom for our tiny little brains to absorb.
“The designated hitter rule shall henceforth be abolished,” Science says betwixt pulls from a hookah. “Fifty years of conclusive OPS plus FIP and OAVG data dictate it must be so.”
Come to think of it, that probably is what most Americans think science is. The other half think it’s Anthony “I Am Soyence” Fauci.
Where were we? Ah yes, cat claws!
The truth is I’ve give up on trimming Bud’s claws. If I notice a really long one I’ll try to trim it, but otherwise I leave the job to him and his 4-foot scratching post.
Maybe that makes me a bad caretaker, but I challenge anyone who’d stick me with that label to try trimming Buddy’s claws.
The little dude goes from chill and relaxed to demonic in a millisecond. He yowls, he thrashes, he flails with claws out and tries to bite any flesh he can reach, no matter how careful I am to try at the “right” time, how gentle I handle him, how careful I am to avoid the quick.
Bribe him with treats? Hah! He will stop yowling and thrashing about with murderous intent just long enough to gobble down the yums, then return to being a whirlwind of claws and teeth without skipping a beat.
And you should hear him. It sounds like I’m torturing Elmo, for crying out loud.
Thankfully he doesn’t hold a grudge and if I give up on trimming, he’ll be ready to plop down into my lap within minutes.
It’s generally understood that all that ghastly claw trimming nonsense is behind us, and we shall speak no more of it.
Speaking of ghastly business, the below video started auto-playing while I was on the throne and filling the idle time by searching for cat-related news:
Pain In The Bud 