Life With a 20 Pound House Cat

Life With a 20 Pound House Cat

Life in the country is always interesting, but one must constantly evaluate all of the variables that can occur.  For example, we live in rattlesnake country.  But, rattlesnakes, like all living creatures, must eat.  For them field mice are a tasty treat and usually quite easy to find.  The job for the people, then, is to cut down on the number of mice around a house that will eliminate a reason for a rattlesnake to reside in the vicinity.  This is usually done by getting a cat that is also a good mouser.  We had such a cat for years, but she eventually got too old to hunt, so that started the conversation as to what kind of cat we should get.  I favored either a Siamese or a yellow one.  We had a great history with both.  Before we could act on our decisions I received a phone call from our neighbor.  She had found two tiny kittens beside the road where we guessed someone had dumped them, which is a stupid and cruel thing to do.  She brought them home, but since they were going away for the weekend, we agreed to keep the kittens for a couple of days.  Of course, we fell in love with these tiny balls of fur, and our neighbor was out of luck.  They probably knew this would happen.  We took the kittens to the vet to have them checked out, and they were both healthy, but sort of underweight at 6 and 8 ounces each.

After a couple of months we had to move every house plant out of the house, because they liked to play jungle and attack each other through the foliage.  Since we had a dog named Jack, we named the kittens Manny and Moe after the Pep Brothers, who owned a rather famous auto store and advertised on the radio and TV.  As time went by, Manny grew the way a cat is supposed to, but Moe never stopped.  He just got bigger and bigger.  At one point, he was stretched out on the end of our bed, so I measured his length from paw to paw at 36 inches.  He eventually stopped growing at 20 pounds.  He and Manny would try to play as they had as kittens, but finally Manny just gave up being rolled and smashed, and wandered off into the wilderness, never to be seen again.  At this point, the trouble started.

Moe, or Big Mo, as he came to be called, learned to really hunt, and brings in mice, lizards, and gophers.  He learned that if he could get them into our sunken shower, they usually couldn’t get out.  Sometimes one would, and that is when my husband found a use for a bell shaped toilet plunger, and that is that the mice would run in that lovely dark hole.  The plunger would be flipped up, taken to the first available door, and the mouse would be sent on a really high roller coaster ride back outside.  Thus, the invention of the mouse-o-matic, which I wrote about last December.

One night I started in to our bedroom to read while my husband watched TV, but stopped to pick up a fruit and nut scone from Costco to nibble on.  Big Mo was on the end of the bed, raised his head, and marched up to my chest and tried to eat the scone out of my hand.  I foolishly broke off a piece and tossed it down to his end of the bed, where he scarfed it down.  He marched back up to my face, followed my breath down inside my bathrobe, where he tried very hard to gain entrance.  I really didn’t want to share my bathrobe with a 20 pound cat!  I had a small piece of the scone left, which I put on top of the bookcase/headboard.  He followed the scent up there, fortunately, but no more scone eating around Big Mo, for sure.

This April we realized that Jack was 11+ years old, and it was time to get a new dog.  So, we got two puppies.  In true puppy style they bounced up to Big Mo, who let them know that bouncing around him was not appropriate behavior.  At the time Big Mo was twice as big as the puppies.  That vision is imprinted in their brains, and even though they are now twice as big as Big Mo, he rules the yard.

Every morning my husband takes the animals on what he calls their “pooper” walk down away from the house.  He looks like the pied piper with one big old dog, one huge cat, and two puppies trailing along behind.  The other morning, Big Mo decided that he didn’t want the puppies to go.  When Bill got up, put on his hat, and opened the front door, Big Mo ran out and chased one puppy one way, waited for the puppy to come around to the front steps, and attacked him there.  Then he ran back up the steps, chased the other puppy the other direction.  That puppy ran around to the bottom of those steps, but Big Mo had gotten to the bottom of the steps first, and attacked that puppy there.  The poor puppies had to wait for the entourage to go quite a ways before they could follow.  We determined that we have the only dog-herding cat in our vicinity.  Of course, Big Mo sometimes decides that he doesn’t want me to go where I am going, and he tries to bite my ankles.  I have finally convinced him that this is not acceptable behavior either, but he sometimes will take a swipe, just in case.

We do live in mountain lion country, and occasionally a lion will come down close to the house and scream at us.  One night, we heard such a scream, and Big Mo ran outside, and tried to run up the hill to chase that other cat away.  We finally convinced him through much yelling and noise making that this was not the usual wandering feral cat that comes our way, and he was at a distinct disadvantage.

Fortunately, Big Mo is not a lap cat.  I can’t imagine watching TV with a 20 pound cat putting my legs to sleep.  However, he does what we got him for.  The mice population is way down, the fear of rattlesnakes has lessened, and we marvel at how that tiny little 8 ounce ball of fur just kept growing.  Thank God he stopped!!