By Adam Stewart
From the Newsroom
In a column in May, I wrote that Minnie, our indoor cat, started pulling out little tufts of her fur, with no obvious cause, as she was otherwise behaving normally.
Online sources about the issue were unhelpful. The cause could be almost anything, including nothing, it seems. When the behavior continued, we made an appointment with Minnie’s veterinarian. The good news when the vet inspected Minnie was that she didn’t show any signs of being injured or in pain.
He couldn’t rule out itchiness, so he gave her a shot for that, but he advised that it was most likely a pure behavioral issue, considering that we noticed it after our weeklong trip away from Minnie. He suggested that if we didn’t see improvement following the shot, we might want to get Minnie a onesie.
So we tried a few different kinds of onesies. The problem is that Minnie does not like wearing anything over her tuxedo. We already knew this. After we adopted her, we tried harness training her so we could give her supervised time outside in the fresh air, and she always hated it. She would just flop down and try to squirm her way out of any harness.
That has repeated itself with onesies to prevent her from pulling out her fur. She flops down and squirms until she can free her legs, then pulls the onesie over her head. And the first couple of onesies took no time at all for her to get out of, because they weren’t quite the right fit.
Last week, we finally found a duck-print onesie that was a good fit. Minnie still didn’t like wearing it, but she at least went a couple of hours before she squirmed enough that she got one of her paws stuck inside the onesie, and Michelle felt like she needed to take it off. Minnie even took a bit of a nap in it. Hopefully, we can get her wearing it for long enough to break the habit of pulling out fur. I don’t know what our next step is otherwise.
As if that wasn’t enough, one morning recently, as I was getting her breakfast, Minnie weaved between my legs, then stopped right in front of me. I tripped over her and had a pretty bad fall on the kitchen floor.
I bruised both my knees, hit both my chin and forehead, and bent my glasses badly enough that I needed to take them to an eyewear store to get them fixed. The worst part, though, was injuring my right thumb. For the past seven days as I write this, it has made gripping anything with my right hand painful—cutting food, turning a doorknob, turning my car key in the ignition.
Or, you know, holding a pen to write with. I’m a newspaper journalist; how often could that come up?
None of this needed to happen. I was on my way to feed Minnie—at the usual time—when she tripped me up. I’m consistently up early to feed the cats. In the four-plus years since we adopted Minnie, I’ve never forgotten to feed her.
But every morning, it is a matter of the utmost urgency that Minnie makes herself a nuisance while I get her breakfast.
Most of the time, Minnie makes the headaches worth it, though. She is the cat that we imagined adopting when we were planning to get a cat: friendly, playful, talkative and affectionate, if a little bit demanding when she wants to play or snuggle.
Adam Stewart is the assistant news editor of The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at adam@hutchtribune.com.