How Long Did I Sleep?!
Posted: October 5, 2011 Filed under: backyard, backyard wildlife habitat, cat photographs, cats, cookie, daily photo, garden, garden cats, photographs, senior cats, tortoiseshell cats | Tags: cat photographs, cats, feline photographs, pet photography, photography, tortoiseshell cats 1 Comment
Cookie awakens to find she's covered with leaves.
Wait a minute, I’m covered with leaves! I thought it was still summer!
How long did I sleep?!
And I’m how old?! No way!
Cookie confides the truth of the matter.
Don’t believe it. I’m just humoring my mom.
I laid down here in my favorite spot for a nice cozy nap and she thought it would be funny to toss leaves all over me and try to convince me I had slept for weeks, even years. Really, she was scouting all over the yard for yellow and orange leaves and giggling at how clever she was.
I know my mom, and you have to let her follow her flights of fancy when she gets an idea. Well, more correctly, you have to just get out of her way because there’s no way to stop her. I’ve spent plenty of long nights keeping her company!
And time? I can tell time, but she was born without an internal clock. Really, years could go by and she’d still think it was yesterday! So she’s more likely than me to wake up—from one of her creative fugues—and discover a season or a decade had gone by.
She won’t even let me off the deck without her, no way she’d let me sleep out here for that long!
She can’t fool me!
But the last time I looked all the leaves were green.
I’m not sure what to think.
And I’m not really 19, am I?
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Basic Feline Wellness
Posted: October 5, 2011 Filed under: adopting a cat, adopting a kitten, cats, dog, feline health, pets | Tags: american veterinary medical association, cat age equivalent, cat health, cat life stages, cat wellness, cats, national pet wellness month, pet wellness, pets, pfizer animal health 2 Comments
In the Bag, pencil © B.E. Kazmarski
I remember someone telling me when I was a child that cats were the perfect pet because they didn’t require any care, you really didn’t even have to feed them.
Unfortunately for cats some people still feel this way, but those numbers are dwindling fast as standards for care are recommended and new methods of care and treatment become available. Our cats may not like seeing the doctor and may expertly hide their symptoms in an effort to seem well even though their living conditions no longer require this evolutionary response to illness, but this is one time when we humans should go against our cats’ will and provide both basic wellness and acute care.
October is National Pet Wellness Month sponsored by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and Pfizer Animal Health, so it’s time to schedule our cats’ appointments and learn how to help them live as healthy and long a life as possible. I’ll be writing articles on care for cats, and my guest writer Karen Sable has prepared a thorough two-part article on helping your pet stay well and getting to know your pet from nose to tail so that you can better tell if something is wrong, which will include a downloadable checklist for your nose-to-tail inspection.
The Creative Cat 