This is Bo-Bo:
His full name is ‘Snowball’ – but he usually responds to the diminutive ‘Bo-Bo’.
This past weekend, my neighbours (and friends) went away for a 4-day trip. As I am the local animal-lover, they asked me to look after their cats (Snowball is one of 3 felines in that family). At the last moment, Snowball (he is a little dominant…) got into a fight with another cat in the neighbourhood and the vet said he must get 2 antibiotic pills a day… could I handle the challenge of giving Bo-Bo his medicine?
I agreed to give it a try – my friends deserved a break!
Snowball was happy to see me when I came in and fed him – the first time. Then he got annoyed that I would not let him out (he was to stay indoors while recuperating). When I gave him his medicine – he got really, really mad at me.
The next medicine time, he was ready!
There was no way he would allow me, an outsider, to come in, hold him down in a chair and shove a pill down his throat! His family may be away, and he may not be feeling his best and I may have taken him by surprise the first time… but – no more! He would fight against this indignity!
Bo-Bo put up a mighty battle…
I did learn some things:
- Cats can – and do – growl.
- If you do NOT allow the cat to ‘have the last word’, the ‘next time’ will much easier.
Yes, I am glad to report that now, Bo-Bo is all well and healthy – and he does NOT growl at me any more. Not even when I put him into the ‘medicine chair’, make him wait till I get the pill, sit beside him, open his mouth and pop the pill in!
Quite a change of attitudes!
And I did not do anything other than outlast his ‘bitching’ and ‘have the last word’.
One could say, I suppose, that I have learned how to ‘out-bitch a cat’!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 