The other night I was doing laundry and noticed that one of our cats was sniffing at the front door (the one we never use) and he was alllll puffed up. I was not at all concerned, which means I called out to Paul in a voice that was working hard to sound unpanicked, and then I went rapidly down to the laundry room and thought about what weapons were at hand if Paul just, like, OPENED THE DOOR and then there was an intruder in our midst. (I was thinking the bleach spray would be pretty useful.)
Or a ghost! SCIENCE DOESN’T KNOW EVERYTHING.
Or a skunk: I thought it might be a skunk. Here is my Twitter haiku on that topic, from another recent situation:
I’d gone flying out the side door to pick up Rob from a friend’s house, and there was a sudden startled, reactive rustle from our yard, and it was a skunk. The skunk and I agreed to go our separate ways peaceably, but it was tense there for a minute. I wondered if maybe that skunk was still hanging around; I could understand a cat getting agitated about that.
The hope with a story like this is that it will come to a satisfying (and, ideally, interesting) conclusion: “So anyway it turned out it was a _______! I never would have thought!” Instead, what I have is a second, even more unsolved situation, which is that some time after the sniffing/puffing episode, our two cats started fighting, not in the irritated way housecats sometimes fight, but in the vicious scary way cats outside the window sometimes fight: yowls that were probably no louder than the ones outside but seemed much worse because of being inside, and full-on angry-cat-face hissing, and big puffed-up fur, and periodic outbreaks of violent activity that luckily didn’t seem to get TOO violent (no one bleeding), but bad enough that I wondered what we ought to be doing: separate them somehow? spritz them with water? Those were some awful yowls.
What I did was get out the extremely expensive spritz bottle of Feliway we bought a number of years ago at the vet’s recommendation when we were having some other kind of cat-aggression issue. It’s hard to even use something that’s made for cats but costs as much as perfume, but this seemed like exactly the moment to use it, and I spritzed some in the air above the cats, hoping the mist would settle around them like a tranquilizing cloud. (It reminded me of the perfume-application instructions from magazines: spritz some in the air and walk through it.) (Which, NO. I am not putting a Swistle-shaped hole through French perfume and allowing the rest of it to settle on the floor. EVERY MOLECULE IS EXPENSIVE.)
It DID seem to help a bit, though the situation remained uneasy for the next hour or so, and when we went to bed we wondered if we’d be awakened in the night by more hostilities. I also sprayed some Feliway on the door the cat had been sniffing. I have no idea if this stuff works at all (and this particular bottle is likely expired), but it made ME feel better to be DOING something.
This is the second episode we’ve had of this one cat seeming to FREAK OUT. The first time was after a dose of Advantage Multi a month or two ago: he yowled at nothing, puffed up, raced around, had an accident on the floor, didn’t sleep for a day, and the vet said, “Hm, yes, let’s not use that on him ever again.” This more recent time was PROBABLY because of some other cat outside, or perhaps a wild animal outside, but it was such an OVER-THE-TOP freak-out PLUS turning against his buddy, and makes me hope he’s not losing his little cat mind.
So this is what it has come to around here: Weird Cat stories.
Oh! In fact, I have another one. I took one of our cats to the vet the other day, and while we (the cat and I) were waiting our turn, a woman was at the desk paying for her appointment—at which she had discovered that her female cat was male. Her cat she’d had for ten years. I summoned enough nosy bravery to ask the vet tech about it after we were called in, and she said yeah, it can be very challenging to check a cat’s bathing suit parts, and it isn’t a common error for a shelter to make, so they (the veterinary practice) just go with what’s on the paperwork. But this cat had a urinary issue, so they checked—and found another, separate issue. The cat’s owner was quite riveted by this news, as was I. “My husband’s going to call to ask how the appointment went,” I heard her say, “and I’m going to say ‘Good, good…she had a sex change.'”
Kitty stories are the best! <3
When I unexpectedly change my daytime routine (like, taking a nap in the middle of the day, or going to work upstairs at my desk when I have been working downstairs at the table for a week) my cat gets confused and starts meowing pitifully because he can't find me. I call "I'm in here!" and then he stops meowing and joins me wherever I am. The "I can't find you!" meow is very different from the "FEED ME" meow.
As far as skunks go: there was one living right next to my parking space for a whole year in college. I saw him almost every day and managed never to get sprayed. I hope you're able to develop as tolerant a relationship with your skunk if he insists on sticking around!
Oh, my cat did the same thing! We’d go upstairs and the cat would sit at the bottom of the stairs and meow sadly until one of us would look over the railing and say “We’re up here” and then she’d run up the stairs to join us!
Hahaha. Cats are so silly. I love them.
After watching too many episodes of My Cat From Hell I would guess an animal was very near to your front door or sprayed it. This causes the cat who notices it to freak out and turn on other cats in the house. It’s not uncommon.
I have a deeply neurotic cat. Feliway also makes a plug in version (like a glade plug in) that lasts for a month. Pricey, but usually can be found a lot cheaper on Amazon than at Pecto/PetSmart. It’s a lifesaver. One plug-in lasts for at least a month!
We had a cat who was so psychotic she had to wear a Feliway-esque collar all the time. (It wasn’t actually that brand but a similar concoction)
Sex change – ha! I can’t imagine having my cat’s gender wrong for many years. It’s sort of funny. I wonder how many “female” traits you’d given the cat all those years, only to find out it was male (or vice versa). Interesting stuff.
I was dropping off some donations at our Humane Society a month ago and playing with a tiny orange kitten named Caroline. Caroline rolled on her back…and I saw that She was He. I told the front desk, we fixed the paperwork and renamed him Cody.
I thought it was hysterical that no one had noticed but he was only about six weeks old and had just arrived at the shelter a few days prior.
I am also riveted by this cat-bits-misidentification story. Is it really that hard to tell a boy cat from a girl cat? I’ve had both varieties and it always seemed obvious. Was this a long-haired cat? How did this go undetected for TEN YEARS?! I mean, I assume the cat came from the shelter already fixed but still. You can still tell! Right? RIGHT? This is blowing my mind.
In skunk news, there’s one that hangs around in our neighborhood from time to time and when I took the dog out late one night we very nearly got sprayed. It was dark and I didn’t realize the skunk had…assumed the position, I suppose, until it was almost too late. Poor ancient dog didn’t understand why I suddenly bolted in the opposite direction, dragging her along, and let me tell you, that is an excellent way to get the ol’ heart rate up.
My in-laws took their definitely male kitten in to be neutered and the vet office tried to spay him!! I’m sure there was great confusion when they couldn’t find any little girl kitty parts inside…
YES! My parents have a cat. Theo. Who is apparently a Thea. After surgery to do cat/urinary/bladder stone things (technical term, as I am a dog-person). Several years later, the whole family still calls the cat he, she, and it. And both Theo and Thea. And I just call he/she/it….”Princess Buttercup”. Because I can.
Hahahaha! I love her reaction to finding out it was actually a girl cat.
Our four year old boy cat has had some serious urinary tract issues, costing $1000s naturally, and this spring it looked like he would have to have gender reassignment surgery to become a female to overcome the issue. My husband was very fraught at the idea of our boy cat becoming a girl cat and was concerned for his identity, but my feeling has always been that once you neuter or spay cats they effectively become genderless anyways. In the end, we went to another vet, spent more money, and now he’s fine (and still effectively male).
I have cat stories!
A) The sex change line is PERFECT. Z had a cat growing up whose name was Georgia. Later they learned that Georgia was actually Leonardo. Or maybe it was the other way around, and Leonardo became Georgia. Either way. (BATHING SUIT PARTS! Immediately imagined cats in bikinis on lounge chairs.)
B) We LOVE Feliway in our house. We use the diffusers that you plug into an electrical socket, and they really worked wonders for our two cats when we were doing extended home repairs and they were really stressed out. It worked well enough that we decided to just keep using them, as our cats are pretty sensitive (according to our vet in DC, Kona is “the most sensitive cat he’s ever met”. Sad that distinction didn’t come with a free vet visit of some kind.). On severla occasions we’ve noticed them acting stressed, out of the blue, and then we’d realize that one or both of the diffusers was empty. For us it’s worth it. (Just tell yourself the expiration date is for the lawyers.)
OH, and a skunk story that could’ve also ended badly! My senior year of college I lived in a typical Boston three family house, on the third floor. The day we moved in, we discovered that my new (to me) queen sized bed wouldn’t fit up the very windy, narrow staircase. Our only hope was to winch it over the railing of the balcony at the back of the house. Blah blah blah, long story short, I am standing there holding up this partially winched mattress while my boyfriend runs back upstairs to pull from the top while out of the bushes wanders a SKUNK. I couldn’t have been alone more than a minute or two, but I was paralyzed and terrified and also unable to move because I was HOLDING UP A MATTRESS. Spraying me would’ve been bad enough but RUINING MY BED in the process?! He came within a couple of feet of me, but my fear paralysis/inability to move less the mattress come crashing down must have paid off because he wandered away; no harm, no foul. Except that I needed a clean pair of underwear.
Recently picked up a friend’s new kitten who was named something overly girly by the six year olds. They weren’t cat people prior to said kitten. This kitten was quite, uh, well endowed for a female princess unicorn buttercup glitterpants. His name is Socks now.
Could there have been a female cat in heat outside your house? Is one (or both) of your cats male? It seems to me that could have caused some aggression, regardless of the intact state or gender/sex of either of your cats.
No cat stories here, but my university roommate used to do that perfume thing – spritz a cloud of it and walk through it. I always thought she looked like a total dork doing this.
I absolutely want to be friends with the lady who was going to tell her husband that the cat had a sex change!