It’s Tuesday, the cruelest day, and China continues to whittle away at my retirement funds. But, on the bright side, the weather is lovely here, predicted to be in the seventies for the rest of the week, and North Korea has reached a temporary detente with the South. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili saw a toy snake belonging to little Hania, and had a violent reaction. It’s clear that many animals, including perhaps cats and humans, have an evolved aversion to snakes. How many readers have seen their cat bridle at faux snakes? I’m convinced by videos like the one I posted on August 12 (and others on the Internet) that cats’ fear of long, thin objects is a hard-wired reaction to a snakelike shape.
Cyrus: Fear not, Hili. It’s just Hania’s toy.
Hili: But what if it bites me first?
In Polish:
Cyrus: Nie bój się, to tylko Hani zabawka.
Hili: A co będzie jeśli ona mnie pierwsza ugryzie?
Leon: And so I was transformed from a hiking cat into a traveling cat.
Professor Ceiling Cat will never retire!
Is that an evolved aversion to all snakes or just the talking ones that try to lure you into earing apples?
That’s gotta hurt!
Apples as earrings? Yeah, that probably hurts. 🙂
I meant “eating apples”.
Sometimes the term, Fraidy Cat, applies but you have to go back to the old Tom and Jerry cartoon to see it for real.
Referring to the stock markets, we can thank the politicians and big business for the lovely IRA/401K life that many people have. And just think, the republicans would like to turn social security into a 401k as well. I praise the old ways and a true pension plan.
One night our cat, Coco Chanel, got rowdy enough in the bedroom to wake me up. I was really tired and wanted nothing more than to get back to sleep. I told her, firmly, several times to settle down. Of course, she ignored me. I would drift off nearly to sleep only to be rudely awakened.
Suddenly it dawned on me that she was now doing whatever it was she was doing right next to the bed. Right next to my head. Realizing I wasn’t going to get any sleep until I looked into this further, I got up and turned on the light. Coco was intently busy with something underneath the desk right next to the bed. I got down on hands and knees to take a look. Curled up just like a cobra in a snake charmer movie scene, with its head raised up out of the center of the coil several inches, was a very pissed off black racer. It was so focused on the cat that had been harrassing it for the past half hour it didn’t even notice me reaching in from behind it to grab it.
I still didn’t get any sleep though. The damn cat was tearing up the bedroom looking for the damn snake for the rest of the night. Crying like a child who has lost their favorite toy.
Sub
Bobcat with timber rattler The bobcat won. (I think this link has public access.)
I’ve never seen my cat, Lloyd, truly terrified of anything except for a garden hose, which I assume he took to be a snake. My poor boy jumped five feet in the air and knocked over my mother’s flower pots.
Remember the mantra: buy low, sell high. If you’ve been planning on (or thinking about) investing, today’s the day to do it — but only if you’re in it for the long haul. And, conversely, today is a bad day to get out of the market.
b&
+1. This is temporary. The stock market will recover, and will end up higher than before. Don’t sell if you can don’t actually NEED the money for a specific purpose.
Our barn cats were very interested in Fox Snakes. Unfortunately, they killed and ate them.
Today is a day to NOT look at the value to my retirement funds. Such as they are.
Not a good day to take a look at all. Unfortunately, the end of the month when those things come in the mail is not far away. Your best bet is not to look at all. The markets will recover in time.
On a finite planet? Are you sure of that?
Once oil starts running out in earnest, the markets may enter a very long-term decline…but there won’t be anywhere else you can put your money that’ll be any better. And there’re some very slim signs of hope that we might be able to transition the passenger fleet to electric on a timetable that doesn’t lag too terribly far behind the decline in petroleum production…if that happens, we may still dodge the worst of the bullet. And if solar picks up at the same time, we could actually come out of it smelling like roses, though it’s waaaaaay too early for me to have much hope for that…
…mainly because we’ve still got the gross overpopulation crisis to deal with. We’ve already got too damn many fucking people, and the least worst of the projections are merely for a slightly less erect exponential growth curve. What we really need is at least a few centuries of 2% – 3% shrinkage….
b&
I’m impressed by Leon’s ability to calmly ride in a car. Most other cats tend to emit yowling noises that suggest imminent psychosis.
I have (well, had – died a couple of years ago) a friend whose cat used to be a relaxed cat passenger. whether it is either a heritable trait, or an educable trait, I don’t know. But I’d bet that if it could be produced with high reliability, there would be a market for the breeding results.
I have noticed one invariable trait of cats which can handle car travel – they’re always someone else’s cat.
I don’t know if you can breed for this.
😀
Breeding has nothing to do with it; how you approach the project is all that matters. Baihu isn’t necessarily overjoyed with the car, but he does just fine in it — and he was a several-month-old feral kitten born to a feral mother when he accepted my invitation to move in with me.
First, get the cat comfortable on a leash on walks around the neighborhood — a similar project.
Then, start your daily walks by opening the car door and closing it without getting inside. After that becomes unremarkable to the cat, sit in the car, get up, and continue the walk. The cat doesn’t have to get in the car with you at first. Again, when the cat is okay, move on little by little to getting the cat in the car, closing the door with the cat inside, starting the car, moving from one end of the driveway to the other, driving around the block, driving around town, stopping at the park before coming home, and so on.
And you’ll likely find that each stage doesn’t need more than a couple-few times for the cat to get acclimated.
b&
My mother’s cat Truffles used to do the 2.5 hour trip to their holiday house regularly and with no complaints. He just slept on her lap the whole way. I hasten to add that she was not the driver!
Baihu actually sometimes does sit on my lap. But I don’t think I’ve had the car over 25 MPH with him there, and most of the roads where he’s sat on my lap have been 15 MPH residential streets.
b&
all of my cats have always loved to attack my belts. Not sure what they’d think about a snake or a snake toy.