A Healthy Coating Of Earth

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I love the way cat tails shrink when they’re soaking wet. The sudden loss of apparent mass is hilariously pathetic.

Yes, we bathed the cats today. This is a big deal—our cats are the semi-feral Outdoor Cat type who rarely get dunked—except, you know, in extenuating circumstances. And the circumstances have become extenuating—Fern, especially, has spent pretty much the entire summer just sitting around in dirt. It’s her new hobby. Every time I go outside, somewhere in the front garden I can see a big ball of increasingly filthy fuzz just meatloafin’ around.

We were going to let it go till the end of the month, but Fern’s other hobby is meatloafin’ in the clean laundry hampers.

“I think,” Mom said, stepping out of the washroom with a re-washed stack of jeans, “that we should probably not wait any longer.”

Charlotte got a bath too—while she doesn’t trail around a Pigpen-worthy cloud of debris like her sister, she does like to pull off the heads of small woodland creatures, and that deserves some washing.

Anyway, on Bath Day the drawbacks of irregular schedules is made abundantly clear: perhaps if we bathed them more often they’d be more sanguine about it. As it is, however, there’s a reason we refer to it as “waterboarding the cats.” But with Mom and me on actual cat wrangling duty and Dad taking his job of cat taunting very seriously, we got ’em looking more or less halfway decent.

They’ve spent the rest of the day nursing their injured dignity* and, probably, wondering what they did to incur our wrath. As for me, I’ve spent the rest of mine nursing a couple of gashes down my arm.

Pets are great.


*By composure grooming and, of course, rolling around in the dirt.

Comments

[bkwrrm-tx.livejournal.com]

Cat taunting? :-)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's one of his favorite sports. Today it took the form of a gleeful Dad standing well back from the carnage shouting things like "HOW'S THE WATER, FERN?"

They hate him.

[bkwrrm-tx.livejournal.com]

Bwahahahaha!

Cat bathing at my house involves my husband, me, one or the other of the cats (because face it, there's not enough energy in the world to do them both at once) and lots of cursing. Feline and human, come to think of it.

The last time we did it was because my older cat, Kali, just smelled *bad*. So, into the sink with the coconut scented flea shampoo (which I use too, upon occasion, because it smells great!). D scruffed her and she actually didn't fuss too much - although she did go in and throw up on my pillow after she finished her grooming. :-)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

HAH! Way to show you who's boss.

Each one got a short scrub with some People Shampoo in the kitchen sink (which we then CLEANED THE HELL OUT OF). Doing them both at once gets it over with.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I've had to wash my two cats, more than once, for flea-related reasons. One of them puts up with it rather sulkily; the other enjoys the water so much as to weird out the people bathing her. "Don't drink the soapy bath water, Aubrey!" has been said more than once, as she cheerfully laps up flea-shampoo-infused dirty water and we try to scrub her down so that we can get her out again quickly.

Neither of them particularly enjoys being bundled up in towels afterward so that they don't trail water all over the house, but you can't have everything.

[beccastareyes]

My sister used to have a ferret which would be bathed regularly to cut down on the mustilid scent*. After the bath, which he'd be all shivery and squirmy for, he'd storm around chattering and jumping and rubbing against things and attacking feet, then crawl into his hiding spot that he tore into the couch lining. (Granted, the chattering, jumping and attacking feet were normal things for him.)

* He had his scent glands removed as a wee thing, but still had a ferret smell.

The cats stayed pretty clean, except for Lilly, Mom's old cat, who had too much fur for her to groom herself. Mom would occasionally go after her with brush or scissors, but after a while, we'd just have to regularly take her to the groomers. Not a fun thing -- Lilly had an awful temper and only liked Mom.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

My buddy had some de-scented ferrets. I could still smell them, and I have very little sense of smell.

It was like that for a while with Mom's horrible undead cat--that is, I think she died at the age of 15, but she just kept MOVING AROUND till she was 20. She got too old to clean herself, so Mom gave her frequent baths. When she was alive she hated baths and would claw and yowl; in her undead years she would still howl and protest but actively lean into the warm water from the faucet.

[beccastareyes]

They don't smell that bad if they bathe regularly and you wash the places they sleep, but the ferret smell builds up. But if you don't like smell, the bathing is key.