Poor Mow (Rhymes with Cow)

I am having terrible trouble concentrating today – it’s a beautiful day outside and I’m stuck in this icky room. My visit to the Bureau of Meteorology went OK (I hope) – because I’m looking at the public's perception of weather forecasts I don’t actually have to be a tech-head (a minor fact that keeps evading me). So now I will talk about cats. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but we have two cats. One is more ‘mine’ – he is pretty – orange and white with not short fur, but fuzzy fur. He is getting fatter – and it’s because he sucks in his breath and looks at our neighbours like he is starving…it’s fairly tragic. His name is Saffron – he used to be nice almost all of the time, but since he has had his feline space invaded….. The other cat is Mow (rhymes with cow) and he is a total fuzzball – he had so much fur that he could hardly deal with it all. He has a very sweet temperament and is almost always very quiet except before having food. This is kind of why what happened to him makes me feel so bad...

We took him to the vet to get all his fur shaved off both to get rid of his burgeoning dreadlocks and to cool him down for the hot weather – the vet said it was a good idea. It was not a good idea. First of all he loved that he could clean himself, and the vet had said he might get really playful as well. So we watched him chase his tail and thought he was really cute. We watched him. We watched him for about 36 hours. It wasn’t cute anymore – it was scary. He was totally freaked out by his tail. Presumably this was because it had transformed from the very fuzzy entity he had known and licked to something that looked like a teenage brown snake. Every time he looked behind him, there was the snake – so he would jump a foot, pedal in the air and streak to the end of the house. And reverse. And repeat. And reverse. And repeat.

Then he got up the courage to attack it. So he started growling and hissing at it (this is from the cat that we were going to name Marcel because he never made any noise except for when he would do the silent little smacky noise that everyone does when you open your mouth but say nothing) and then he would bite it. And this would hurt. You would assume that this might convey some knowledge that the snake may actually be his tail…possibly in disguise? Nope. It merely indicated to the poor tortured creature that the snake was sooo evil, smart and wily that it took pleasure in biting him at the same time as he bit it. Too scary for a cat!! More streaking from one end of the house to the other. More noise like we had suddenly got five cats filled with animosity rather than our cat and a half. (Though if you count Saffron’s fat, and use it to replace Mow’s lack of fur, it kind of does equal out to two normal cats…but I digress).

During this time I found that the only time Mow could rest was when he sat on the couch with me or M – we patted him and held him in such a way that he couldn’t see the snake. I was sitting with him in this way about three days after the de-furring and noticed he had a big cut under his arm. Bloody vet. I knew cats were hard to shave, and under their arms is very thin and delicate. M thought he must have cut himself whilst attacking the snake on the roof, I stuck to my evil vet theory. So we took him back to the vet, and she was fairly up front about admitting that it had probably happened at her end, whilst M told her of his roof theory and I stared at her meaningfully with a glint of gunmetal in my cold blue…oops…sorry. She gave him some shots and didn’t charge us (which further indicated the culprit) and we took Mow (who had been shaking since we stepped in the door) home again. We had explained to her about the tail saga, but she seemed to think we were either deranged or joking and didn’t understand at all.

It has now been about two weeks and Mow is almost back to his normal self after being divested of his true furry identity. He is much more affectionate (I think because he sees us as his saviours from the snake, rather than the evil and unthinking orderers of his furs execution) and now only chases the snake about 15 times a day instead of 87. The moral of this sad story is:
Think before you get your cat shaved – will it be good for his psyche to have the very thing that identifies him taken away?