By Jim Hagarty
1989
Over a long winter stuck inside the house, my female cat Grumbles soon runs out of interesting things to do. After all, even the most easily entertained cat will eventually get bored with unrolling the toilet paper from its holder on the bathroom wall, tearing yesterday’s newspaper into 200 little bits and knocking glass ornaments off the top of the kitchen cupboards and into the sink below.
Even her latest activity – pulling facial tissues one by one out of their box and shredding them to pieces – left her yawning and restless after only a week or two. As did tipping over her water dish, wrestling all the throw rugs into tangled balls and bending the curtain rods over the basement windows by somehow walking across them.
All this destructive feline aggression is usually spent on the hapless mice, birds, rabbits and snakes that wander, fly and slither by my house in the summertime. But in winter, there are only inanimate objects available for mauling in the house.
Or are there?
Somewhere along the line, Grumbles discovered that my male cat Buddy could serve as a suitable wintertime substitute for the poor creatures she torments outside all summer. In fact, he’s an ideal target because his hulkish build makes him much slower on his feet than she is and his gentle nature prevents him from fighting back. She can slap the whiskers off him before he knows what’s happening and be sure he won’t pay her back in kind. If he ever did, she’d have been the late Grumbles long ago but he’s part pacificist and part chicken and so she escapes retribution.
At least feline retribution.
The human occupant of the house hasn’t been quite so passive about Grumbles’ use of poor Buddy as practice prey. In recent weeks, I’ve tried to institute some disciplinary measures to restore harmony to my home but they’ve met with only limited success. My plan seemed like a good one, based as it was on a few sketchy principles I remembered about aversion therapy from my Psychology 101 days in university. Each time she whacked Buddy, I’d make her life miserable. She’d put two and two together and realize every attack on Buddy always resulted in a swift and marked decline in her own happiness.
A few such experiences and she’d give it up.
All that remained was to decide on a suitable punishment. I chose my unheated, darkened garage as probably the best place for Grumbles to serve uncomfortable 10-minute sentences after each and every run she took at Buddy.
At first it seemed to work. And the attacks grew fewer as Grumbles spent more and more time in her chilly solitary confinement.
But the psychologist who thought up aversion therapy never had Grumbles as a patient or that great theory might never have gotten off the ground. Because in a week or so, Grumbles decided 10 minutes in the garage five times a day was a fair price to pay for the fun of hunting Buddy down. Lately, after committing yet another assault, she’s even taken to running to the kitchen door that leads to the garage and waiting for me to let her out there.
And the effect has worn even thinner since Buddy, obviously as unaware of the principles of psychology as he is of self-defence, has taken to running out in the garage too when I open the door to send Grumbles to her punishment, the equivalent of a crime victim locking himself in the jail cell with the one who did him wrong.
Buddy also does not understand the criminal justice system.
At this writing, I am experimenting with feline crime prevention through the use of water and a spray bottle. Initial tests appear positive.
But if this doesn’t work, my next strategy is boxing lessons for Buddy.
Though I’ve come to believe that learning and Buddy are two mutually exclusive concepts.
