prechrswife
01-24-2004, 09:19 AM
This past Monday, Samson was due for his annual visit to the vet. Samson is our fraidy cat when it comes to strangers visiting the house, but he has always been fairly easy to deal with when it comes to traveling. He doesn't like actually getting in the carrier, but he has never run from it. On Monday, I went out to the shed, got his carrier, and brought it inside. He and Saphirah were on the bed in our bedroom, so I sat the carrier down inside the doorway and started toward him. He went into serious fraidy cat mode! He went under our bed, where he had managed to get one end of the thin piece of fabric covering the bottom of the box spring pulled loose. (It has been that way for awhile and is his favorite hiding place.) My husband and I are both lying on our stomachs, looking at this cat-sized bulge hanging down under the bed, trying to figure out how to get Samson out of there. We tried easing him toward the opening and anything else we could think of. No luck. Finally we had to slide the mattress off the bed, and my husband tilted the box spring, so theoretically the cat would slide out. (He wasn't that far from the end, just too far for us to get to.) At that point that thin fabric decided to give way at the weight of an almost 13 pound cat. Samson hit the floor and ran. (He didn't fall more than a few inches.) At this point we were really laughing at the whole situation, probably to keep from screaming in frustration. We closed the doors to both bedrooms to avoid a repeat experience and tracked him to the couch, where I was eventually able to pull him out from beneath it. It still took both of us to get Samson in the carrier. Meanwhile, our house looked like a tornado had struck. After all of that, though, I'll have you know, he was a perfect angel at the vet's office. (Moral of this story: Bring the cat to the carrier, not the carrier to the cat.)