"They don't bark so you have to be alert to get their signals"

Since having her teeth cleaned by the vet a few days ago, Tiny has had to endure a daily regime of Clamavox applied by eyedropper. Once she gets wind of our intentions, she's outta here. Above, near the top of the back stairs this morning, staring back down with suspicion and disdain.

"The animals -- especially Tiny, who has not a sixth but a seventh or eighth sense about these things -- always try to escape our clutches once they catch on that it's time to go for a ride in the car. More than once Tiny's made eye contact with sudden realization and hightailed it for the most inaccessible place she can find," we wrote awhile back. The same applies when she gets the faintest whiff of suspicion we are about to give her some medicine.

We've tried to develop a business-as-usual air about our movements and tone of voice when we're about to play Nurse Jane or do something else they don't like, but cats are ever watchful, supremely tuned in to the slightest changes in their environment. Just this moment we happened to glance outside the window to the side yard to see Tiny and Baby -- restrained by their tethers -- frozen in alarm, their eyes fixed upon some point beyond the 12-foot-high retaining wall behind the house. Looking up, we saw what had given them pause, a team of roofers working atop the neighbors' house. "Just like watchdogs," observed Goomp in response to our imail description:

We: Yes. You can tell from their expressions and body language that something is not as it should be.

Goomp: They don't bark so you have to be alert to get their signals.

As Mummy always said, "Look to the animals."

Update:  From the horse's mouth (our sis), the provenance of Mummy's adage:

She said it to me, when I was flummoxed . . . wasn't sure whether to comfort infant Matthew every time he cried. Mummy was saying, implicitly, that mother animals ALWAYS tend their infants when they are disturbed.

Animals that make it through the great winnowing process of evolution know everything they need to know. As for our own species, we sometimes wonder.

Comments

[goomp]

Animals that escape from the wild to take advantage of the relative ease and safety of living with humans may not be able to do math but their ability to survive in the wild when necessary shows they still possess talents lost to the human animal.