A NOT Amusing article from an idiot who shouldn't own a pet!
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/du...l/10348015.htm
Posted on Mon, Dec. 06, 2004
Sam Cook: Feline's free-for-all isn't worst of tomcat's travails
These are long days for Max.
Max is our Holstein-colored second cat. By day, and much of the time by night, Max is the most relaxed cat you could ever meet. Unlike Freccles, our fussy and semi-jumpy No. 1 cat, Max is entirely unflappable.
Once, with a sick child at home, I had to retrieve a comforter from an upstairs bedroom and take it downstairs to the sick child. I found Max sprawled on the comforter upstairs.
"Sorry, Max," I said. "Gotta steal your bed."
Max opened one eye, barely. I began pulling the comforter gently. Max opened another eye. But he didn't budge.
As an experiment, I decided to simply drag the comforter off the bed. Max didn't tense a muscle. When the comforter slid to the floor, Max was still reclining on it, unfazed.
A cat hates to interrupt a good nap, you know.
So, continuing the experiment, I pulled the comforter down the hall and started gently down the stairs. This is all completely true. Max was happy to come along for the ride -- lump, lump, lump -- down all 14 stairs, across the living room and up onto the lap of the sick child.
I'm not a cat guy, and I love Max.
But Max has another life that we know very little about. Late at night, out in the neighborhood, Max is a fighter. We don't know whether he seeks out these feline fisticuffs or whether he's simply defending his own turf.
All we know is that a couple of weeks ago, he came home with his face rearranged. Chunks of flesh almost the size of dimes were missing from his cheek and jowls. One night, his lip was swollen.
We let this go for a while, until Max began looking so rough we were afraid we would become one of those headlines: "Duluth couple ignores festering cat wounds; Humane Society seizes feline."
My wife Phyllis, the alpha cat woman of our home, took Max to the vet, where $199 got him a face shave, a wound cleaning and some antibiotics. His discharge orders say Max can't go outside for a week.
Max spends most of his time now sitting inside the back door, hoping someone will spring him free. In the meantime, he emits the longest, most mournful meows imaginable. I stopped doing the dishes one morning to time one of his wailings. It went on for 3.4 seconds.
Try it. Have someone stand next to you and meow while you count one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three point four. It's pitiful.
He sounds like he's missing a woman cat, although, surgically speaking, Max should no longer be interested. Maybe he just misses fighting.
The other night, he ripped off a couple of the saddest 3.4s you've ever heard. I envisioned him up on a cat stage with his cat electric guitar, singing low-down cat blues.
"I got me a woman-cat, can't get past this door to see her
"Got me a woman-cat, needs me so bad
"She don't care I got only half a face
"Got to see my woman-cat, then whup that calico Tom."
"Sorry, Max," I tell him. "It's for your own good."
He laid a G-chord on me and slid right into the second verse.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAM COOK is a News Tribune columnist and outdoors writer. Reach him at (218) 723-5332 or [email protected].
