The cat and the Christmas tree

[nlbarber]

I've been worried about how Fish the cat will deal with the Christmas tree. Fish is just barely a year old, very playful, and not real bright. I didn't get a tree until last weekend, and have been introducing it in stages. On Saturday, the tree came indoors. Fish investigated, removed a dead twig to play with and chew on, but then found the sheet on the floor around it of much more interest than the tree itself.

Sunday, I put the lights on the tree, and added 4 or 5 ornaments, all chosen to be non-breakable, and placed on the lower branches. Fish seemed mildly interested, but didn't seem to feel that all these items were new cat toys. Good progress, I thought. But I didn't do any more decorating, because I needed to wait for the assistance of my nieces and nephew and due to various problems, they didn't manage to come over.

So, here it is, Monday night, and I'm back in the study on the computer. And I hear the sound of something being dragged on the hardwood floor, coming closer to me. Now, this is usual--Fish has a couple of toys attached to a string and a pole, and he's prone to drag these through the house to wherever I am as a not-so-subtle hint that I should play with him. But this noise was louder. And there was lots of jingling from his collar tags. Something else was going on.

And then Fish shot into the room, trailing a tangled mess of Christmas tree lights, which had somehow gotten hooked around him and panicked him so that he ran:

(cue music)
He ran through the dining room,
he ran through the kitchen,
he ran down the hallway
up to the study door....

At about the study door, he got himself unhooked, and went to hide under the desk behind a footstool. My father and I picked up the light strings, now stretched along the full length of the aforementioned path, untangled them, and put them back on the tree (which was still standing, by the way). They aren't working so well, but given the risk that this might happen again, I think I'll just live with the stretches of unlighted bulbs for now.

In my Christmas joys list are the joy that only a few unbreakable ornaments were on the tree, that I string the lights in a zig-zag across the front of the tree and not in circles around it, and that I didn't plug the lights in when I came in from dinner....

Comments

Unguided Kitty Missile

[trolleypup.livejournal.com]

Been there, seen that. Was my friend Denise's 'fraidy cat Max (not Boober, the big and stupid one would just have done the broken toy thing tangled in the lights...really dumb "Why can't I move Mom?") who was playing with bags and got partway inside a crackly plastic handle bag. High speed brownian cat motion. Couldn't do anything until she fetched up with a thump against the dryer, by which time we were both laughing so hard we could hardly stand up. And that was the end of habituating Max to Robert.