Cats gone Walkabout: page 2

This did not sit too well with Nougat, who would sit at the door yowling. My step-daughter says she caught him pissing on the wall one day when she was cat-sitting. So, at this point we were not just back at step one, we were at step zero.

Actually, this was a step forward, as we soon realized that at least one of our cats was pissy because he wanted out of the house. We decided that Nougat would become a tour guide to the outside for Gracie, our Calico. This way they could explore using the buddy system, and that would leave Junior, alone in the house.

Junior is the smallest cat, and he's always one of the culprits in any dust-up with the cats so giving him some private time did not seem to be too much of a problem. In fact, the writing was no longer on the wall, or the counter, and it seemed like everything was going well for about a week. That was when Junior made a break for it.

Junior wanted out of the house. As comfy, and warm as it was, it was still the big house, and he was in solitary confinement. This little gray striped tabby was on the lamb, and nobody was going to catch him.

Did I mention that Junior's major failing is that his little brain does not have enough cells to multi-task? In fact, the few cells he has are completely dedicated to making him cute, so they're really over-worked when he decides to do anything more. So, when he hatched his plan to break out the the big house, he forgot the little part about his second great failing.

His upper fangs (calling them canines is an insult to cats) grew out at the wrong angle to be any use in procuring food. This meant that he could run, and he could hide, and he could hunt, but he could not catch. It only took a couple of days for this to really sink into his terribly overworked cute-centric brain.

In the mean-time, we decided to give up any hope of keeping cats in the house. I also figured that having Gracie and Nougat outside would lure Junior out in the open. Between hunger and familiar faces, Junior finally caved in.

I found him sitting in the yard with Gracie and Nougat one afternoon. He acted like nothing had ever happened, and that the yard was some extension of the living room. It was a completely different story when I opened the back door. He bolted into the house and ran up the stairs to where we keep the cat food, and immediately began making up for lost meals.

Since then, we keep the back door open when we're home, and close it at night. Nougat and Gracie keep close to the house and come running when I get home. Junior tends to stay out much longer than the others, but has never stayed out more than a day or two. There's been NO inappropriate pissing, and the litter boxes are almost never used. I still dread the day that one of them gets run over, or just stops coming home, but they seem to be much happier.