Princess (aka "Idiot Child" -- and with reason!) used to chase her tail whenever she noticed it wiggle-waggling at her. I sometimes wondered if it was saying something Particularly Nasty in sign language, because there seemed to be such concentrated hatred in her determination to Catch And Kill That Thing. Growls and snarls that sounded more like a something from a Great Dane or a Rotty than a little bitty fuzzball of a kitten...

It stopped rather suddenly the day she finally caught it -- and chomped it, but good.

Such a pained, stunned yowl I've never heard before, and I never want to hear again. I damned near had a heart attack -- and I was at the other end of the house at the time. I thought something truly horrible had happened to her -- like she'd finally chewed through one of the electric wires, or something equally bad.

Her next project was trying to get away from That Fuzzy Thing, so it wouldn't hurt her again, I guess. It was the only reason I could think of, anyway -- though I'll freely grant that cats don't seem to need anything their people would consider a "reason" to do something... (Unless the reason is just to drive us crazy, that is.)

I still haven't decided which mode was worse -- trying to explain to visitors that the cat was acting like a crazy thing because she hated her tail got me a lot of Very Strange Looks.

On the other hand, trying to explain to those same visitors just a little while later that the cat was not mistreated, she was just slinking around near the walls and trying to hide under/behind/inside of things because she was afraid of her tail was even more difficult. They just didn't seem to believe me, for some strange reason.

All in all, I'm glad she outgrew (or was cured of) both behaviors. It was much easier to live with her after that -- well, except for the (thankfully short!!) time when she seemed to've decided that my feet were her Deadly Enemies -- but only at night, for that one. It made an early ayem trip to the bathroom or the kitchen seem very much like a stroll amid booby-traps, or a walk in a minefield.

Copyright © Janice Munday
November 12, 1999