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Now the post: For first-time readers, this is Heather, whose mottled or "heatherspun" coat color can also be described as tortoiseshell, or "tortie." (In Virginia, where we live, human children who share Heather's date of birth started school this week; she's almost five years older than she was when this picture was taken.) She's mostly American Shorthair with some Siamese ancestors, from whom she inherited her body shape; she's also a polydactyl--a mutant gene that appears in several breeds.)
I'm totally slacking on Internet time, because it's August, people are still doing summer things instead of hiring me to write stuff (even though a few people are still trying to find me at Hirewriters, where I no longer exist)...and Heather says I have obligations at home. That look of mild disapproval is all Heather's ever really done to enforce her royal will. It works, because she's even cuter when she's pleased...
Early this spring, regular readers remember, she gave birth to five kittens and just refused to try to bring them up at all. I brought her generous supplies of food and water; she ignored them, and deliberately consumed just barely enough food and water to keep herself alive, to terminate lactation, because she refused to nurse those kittens. She always used to rear kittens as a team with Irene and Ivy, she nonverbally said. With both of them gone, what was she supposed to do with kittens?
Midsummer, Heather's long, lean body started to bulge again. I thought there was some chance that if Suzie Q, the "Torbie" from the broken-up cat sanctuary nearby, had kittens about the same time Heather did, Suzie might be willing to share parenting duties. No such luck. Suzie wasn't even willing to put up with my preposterous human ideas about cats staying indoors and not destroying the nests of House Wrens...scroll down for that story.
Heather gave birth to three kittens whose eyes and ears are just starting to open. Maybe she'd learned something from Suzie, at least. She chose a well-hidden nest site, allowed me to see where it was but not to see the babies, and started spending most of her time in her den. During the first week of August she gave birth to three kittens. On Saturday, the twelfth of August, she sneaked the kittens into a corner of my home office and nonverbally made it clear that she was enlisting me as parenting partner. If I'd watch the kittens half the time, she'd contribute her usual share of her time to getting them through infancy.
By agreeing to this nonverbal contract I was, of course, agreeing to spend the rest of August doing...oh, you know, normal-human summer things, not spending every day online. The computer's daily page view count is still in four figures, but U.S. page views have been below 500 per day. Well, in the U.S. it's summer; people are supposed to be outside doing summer things, not staring at supplementary room heaters all day. (Have you ever used a thermometer to measure how efficient your computer is as a supplementary room heater?) Anyway, that many readers I should be able to satisfy in two or three half-days online each week.
(Unfortunately, for those hoping for a polydactyl social kitten...once again some worthless lazy scumbucket sprayed poison on harmless weeds a real human being could simply have cut back, and one morning Heather showed no enthusiasm for her breakfast, and although charcoal restored Heather's energy and appetite, two kittens died. At least they didn't seem to suffer as much as foster kitten Boots did. The surviving kitten took a dose of charcoal, herself, and seems subdued, but may live...at this point it still seems chancy. Young kittens are so vulnerable, especially if they're born as a second litter in one year, that I've felt superstitious about even mentioning that Heather was pregnant again.)
I still have very mixed feelings about cats being indoors in August. Heather is good at keeping herself flea-free. I still have some of the herbs-and-borax flea powder that helped me bond with Heather's great-grandmother ten years ago; the herbs don't smell as strong, but borax never loses its power to kill small nuisance animals on contact. On the other hand, even herbs-and-borax is not recommended for use around tiny nursing kittens. And this has been the worst year for fleas I can remember; it's one of those summers when anyone walking past a house where a dog or cat lives is likely to pick up a flea.
Well, I'm Highly Sensory-Perceptive; what that means is that I'm over fifty years old, I've never worn glasses, and I still see dog and cat fleas, although I now have to spend a few seconds looking at them to see their little heads and legs. It's taken me some time to understand how it's possible for "normal" humans not to be able to see them. I had one roommate who didn't believe her dogs were infested with fleas; I picked them up and showed them to her; she didn't see anything. Cat and dog fleas are about the size of the lower-case letter "i" as it's showing up on the computer I'm using--at the default "zoom" setting. Devices differ but, if you routinely "zoom in" to 125% or larger letters, probably you either don't see your pet's fleas at all or don't see them as different from other specks of "dirt." In that case, if you're in southwestern Virginia, I recommend accepting the fact: Your pet has fleas. Since cat and dog fleas can't actually live on human blood, your pet's fleas are probably less of a nuisance to you than the mosquito population, which is also booming this year. However, cat and dog fleas are not born knowing that they can't live on human blood, and they're likely to attack humans too, especially when they're able to "multiply like fleas" and drain enough blood from their natural hosts that the cats and dogs start to become anemic.
Vigilant and efficient though Heather is, how could anybody keep indoor kittens from being eaten up by fleas, which would then attack the humans, in a year like this one? I wondered.
 |
| Sydney the "Australian Shepherd" dog...has lost some of the surplus weight since this picture was taken, but has not really recovered her girlish figure. |
Sydney, the big (formerly "problem") dog with whom I bonded at the Dog Sanctuary, came to our rescue. A sixty-pound shaggy dog is guaranteed to be carrying a load of fleas wherever she goes. That, plus her dominant personality, caused Sydney to be evicted from her first home, then reclaimed from another adopter who kept her constantly on a short chain, before she finally found a permanent home with a relative of the humans at the Dog Sanctuary.
She's as quiet and clever as a cat and I'd sit with her again in a New York minute--I've even signed up for a list of emergency adopters, if she ever needs to be adopted--but nobody would want to quarrel with Sydney. Especially not if she's feeling miserable and grumpy because of all those fleas. But this lucky dog found a human who's willing to sit on the porch for a half-hour or so, almost daily, with a cup of soapsuds, removing fleas, dirt, and matted undercoat hairs from her coat, with a fine-toothed comb. This and other acts of love keep Sydney positively sweet-tempered and her home a place some humans like to visit.
So a friend of the Cat Sanctuary sent Heather and the kittens a fine-toothed comb. Amazon offers quite a selection of these devices. The one shown below looks similar to the Everpet (Dollar Store brand) model for which our sponsor paid $2 plus sales tax, in the store. Most of the flea combs on Amazon seem to cost a little more than $2.
Here's a cheap model:
Deluxe models, like this double-toothed comb, can run up to $15 online.
Anyway, Heather nonverbally raves over her flea comb.
This surprised me, because, most of the time, she does not actually have fleas. She attracts them, as all cats do. Fleas can hop all the way up to penthouse apartments where pampered pets spend their lives indoors; they smell the blood of their host species, and follow the scent. But they spend most of their time on the ground, or the floor, or the bed, where the host animal has been, in between meals, making baby fleas (which are too small for even HSP eyes to see, and apparently live on dust for the first weeks of their lives, before they mature enough to start hopping about and biting bigger animals). Fleas can torment kittens at their leisure, but when they bite a cat like Heather, with short hair, healthy reflexes, and experience, the cat bites back. Heather has probably been the last cat hundreds of fleas ever attacked. My working definition of a bad flea season is one in which I see an adult cat scratching, or spot a flea scuttling from the vulnerable skin on a cat's head into the denser fur on the cat's back (where I can't catch it)...at all. But fleas can torture cats, just as mosquitoes can do for humans, without riding around on their victims all the time.
Cats purr on different notes, and the flea comb elicited the special purr that my current cat family usually reserve for bonding-through-grooming between litter mates or mothers-and-kittens. And once in a while I really do wear things that expose skin on my back, in my own home, in hot weather--and after one flea-combing session Heather ran around and washed the bare skin on my back.
This nonverbal rave seems to translate as something like, "I love it, I love it, I love it! Oh, Mama! It feels like being a kitten and having my mother take care of fleas for me, all over again! I love you! What can I do for you? Would you like me to wash your back? Ugh, ick, you taste human, but I don't mind washing you anyway because you're such a good friend..."
Fine though the hair on a cat's head is, the flea comb does pick up a few fine, soft hairs and particles of dirt, if not an actual flea, from an adult cat's head. From the body, it removes those fluffy little hairs that cats shed in great mats in spring, but continue to shed in smaller quantities all through the year. Evidently these effects make our furry pets feel cooler and cleaner, as well as scratching itches and removing biting fleas.
This August we've finally seen temperatures above ninety degrees Fahrenheit, briefly. (Most years, in August, in Virginia, the temperatures stay near ninety degrees all day long, and the human brain goes into a sort of sub-estivation state...it's not that I'm ungrateful, but this milder weather also seems to encourage fleas.) On ninety-degree days it's possible to "teach" cats to bathe or swim along with their humans. Cats who do this will usually spend some time standing on or walking around the edge of a tub or pool, nonverbally saying "You look as if you're actually getting wet on purpose? Humans are strange," before they take the plunge, discover the pleasure of cooling down and forcing fleas to desert their coats, and then form a habit that may become hard for their humans to break.
Some humans, like Cleveland Amory, claim not to mind sharing their baths with their cats after allowing the cats to form this habit. (On purpose? Yankees are strange...my preference is to clean key parts of myself with the shower hose before I collect water in which to soak in the tub, and I wouldn't feel clean after sharing a bath with a cat.)
This is cute, if not sanitary. I used to know a minister from Jamaica who invested the time in training indoor kittens to bathe near their humans in a smaller basin the cats learned to regard as their very own private bathtubs, having the basin near the human's tub or shower and shampooing the cat with its own special soap, and if I were going to live in a tropical country like Jamaica (or even Florida) I'd try that, too.
(Disclaimer: I don't own a copy and don't know whether she describes training kittens to take baths in the book. She lived with a cat who had been so trained while interning at a church I used to attend.)
But it's a lot easier to train a cat or dog to appreciate being groomed with a fine-toothed comb. Like cutting back and digging up weeds, this takes a little more effort than merely dumping poisons into the world...but then again, it's better for the environment. Herbs and borax are natural when used in moderation, but not around fragile baby kittens. Flea combs can be used as often as they're needed--and although baby kittens thrive on a minimum of handling and exposure to light during the first weeks of their lives, once they venture out of the nest they can enjoy being combed just like their mothers.
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