Lumpy's Corner

Finally, I found it... Well actually, somebody else, a certain leprechaun over at wyldryde did. In a humbling manner, I have finally found a long sought book again. Thanks Leprechaun!

You Can Train Your Cat (A Fireside book) was a paperback I owned and swore by years ago. As soon as Leprechaun put the link up to it at Orphan Treasures, I realized why all my searched for "Yes, You can Train a Cat" had failed... because, it is not the title. Color me simple. Thanks again Leprechaun.

Well, it seems like my nature for sharing, or perhaps showing off depending on your view, and my room mates have combined to produce a few questions. Lumpy's cats will likely do that agin in the future. Fluffy balls of fur tend to do that.

The first being; can you train a cat? The answer is a definitive yes. How else would they have existed as domesticated animals since the Egyptians? All jest aside, more often than not a person really means; "How well can you train a cat?"

In my opinion, they can be trained very well. The cat below, is not even a year old. His brother is just as manageable. Check out the video and then you decide.

I think, considering my efforts, my cats are very well trained. I attribute much of this to just a few things. First of all, I really love them and enjoy working with them. Second, is many years back I read this book.

The second question was why does your flickr set include so many photos of your cats sleeping?

Mainly three reasons:

1. They sleep about 17 hours a day presenting lots of opportunity for such shots.
2. Feeding mode and napping mode are about the only time they are stationary enough to get an easy photo of... I have many action shots of "parts" of my cats.
3. When napping, they are likely behaving and looking cute.

Sometime life is so ironic. I was planning to visit my folks this weekend but my cat kookie decided it would be best for me to stay home and deal with his infected eye. Instead of getting better after visiting the vet on Wednesday, the poor feline's eye was only getting cloudier on Saturday. The vet gave me additional instructions. Meaning more frequent applications of eye irrigation and eye ointment.

Now both of my feline roommates are very well behaved and docile animals. This however matters little when the animal does not understand that the "treatment" going to benefit him. His only though it "God gave me claws, you are not putting that stuff on my eye!"..

I have found that the only method I can deal with the furry spastic fearful ball of fur is to toss the poor little bugger into a military laundry bag. The draw string allows just enough cloth to bunch up around his neck so that he can't get those claws into me and ruin another set of pants but not tight tnough to choke him or bind his neck. He is actually adapting well to this new 5 time per day ritual. He hasn't hissed and growled since Saturday now.