Well, it's kind of a love/hate relationship. The really juvenile kind that comes with showing off in front of each other, trying to ignore each other and trying to show off in front of each other.

The girl cat is "Spot" a cat from the neighbourhood. She's been coming around almost daily for months now. She's a thin, very short haired white cat with a brown tail, one brown ear and a perfectly round brown spot on one side of her. Sometimes we lovingly refer to her as "Bullseye" too. Although she is skinny, she seems well fed (she isn't nearly as skinny as most of the street cats) and we think she belongs with some neighbours. But she wants to be our cat, that much is obvious.

She will come to the house and go to sleep on the mat in front of our sliding glass doors in the living room. She sleeps and sleeps there and lolls about stretching and yawning. This drives Vino insane! He will sit just inside and stare her down the whole time she sleeps. He even yowls loudly at her and she ignores it.

This happened yesterday. I was working out and Vino was yowling his displeasure at the interloper. I finished working out and ate a can of tuna. Vino hates tuna, he's never eaten it. Well this time he was all over me trying to get at my tuna! Weird. So I gave him a bit, which he inhaled. He kept begging for more and so I kept giving him some. This is like the first time ever he's eaten tuna, or at least the first time in several years.

When there was no more tuna to share, Vino went straight to the sliding glass door where Spot was sleeping and breathed tuna fumes through the crack of the door! Hahaha! So funny! Spot jumped up and glared at Vino in envy. They glared at each other for a while. Then Spot shot to the other side of the yard and caught a lizard. She took the lizard to a location where Vino could easily see her and devoured it right in front of him. Ha!

It was like Vino was showing off that he was a spoiled housecat who gets fed tuna, and so Spot got him back by showing off that she was a free outdoor cat who can chase lizards anytime she wants.

This is turning into a real feline soap opera. What will happen next???

Copyright © Britta Wilson
December 4, 2002