Well, today I had to take Pixel in for some hardware maintainence, which involved a general anesthetic. I picked her up a little while ago, minus a few more teeth but with a neat bandage around her right foreleg. She started making croaking noises on the way home (I can sympathise, I do the same after a general), and by the time I got her inside she was shouting frantically. As soon as I let her out of the travel cage, she staggered out the back into the garden, where it became clear that a lot of what she was shouting was essentially "God, I need to pee NOW!"

After some frantic digging and a sigh of relief, she came charging back into the house, having suddenly realised it was pouring with rain, and fell over. This kept her occupied for a while, until I put down some tuna (her favourite food by a long way), at which point she remembered how to walk. The tuna disappeared within seconds, after which she wandered upstairs and tried to get onto the bed. It took several tries.

Her pupils are completely dilated, and if she was a human she'd be giggling and waving her hand in front of her face, watching the pretty colours. She started trying to get the bandage off her leg, but after a few minutes lost track of what she was doing and ended up playing with the few inches she'd managed to unwrap, then lost track of THAT and just rolled around on the floor purring.

Seems like whatever she was given is good fun, at any rate.

pca

BTW now she's sitting up, swaying gently from side to side with a weird feline grin on her face.

Time to queue up some Bob Marley tracks and dim the lights.

When my parent's cat had some maintenance done the general wore off from the front backwards. The result was that he could walk quite happily with his front legs he wasn't really in control of the rear end. This meant that he staggered round the room with his bum swaying from side to side in an odd manner.

We tried not to laugh at him, but it was difficult...

Ah, yes, cat anaesthesia, what a wonderful source of innocent merriment.

Two partners ago we had a cat that needed an operation, and we picked him up from the holding cage on a pretty windy blustery cold day (in Brisbane, believe it or not). When we got him home he was obviously uncoordinated and was trying to walk by crossing his paws in front of eachother. He looked pretty cold so we turned on the bar heater. He sort of walked up to it, and then just collapsed with his head face-down in front of it. We stretched him out so he was getting warmth all along his body and he got back to normal pretty quickly, but the faceplant was particularly amusing.

This was the same cat that was galloping around the house one night (he could go through the bedroom, around the corridor, through the living room and through the front room back into the bedroom; and would do laps of this at, oh, say, three o'clock in the morning). At the end of one of these laps he decided to settle on my side - the far side from where he was coming from. Only what he didn't realise was that there wasn't any room on my side; I was close up to the side of the bed. So he overshot and ended up with his back legs on the bed and his front legs on the ground and his head stuck under the stool for the dresser. He was stuck like that, with both of us laughing our heads off, for a couple of seconds. Then he recovered and, naturally, furious washing ensued.

Ah, cats. They're so much fun. Cats and laser pointers are the ultimate entertainment!

Paul

Cats and laser pointers are the ultimate entertainment!


Why is that?

I mean, a cat that will ignore a "spot" from an ordinary flashlight will go bonkers, literally climb the curtains and the walls to chase a laser pointer.

Dogs, too (although they don't climb the curtains very well.)

tanstaafl.

I amused myself with that very vice just last night, much to the consternation of my beagle, Gromit.

-Zeke

I don't know.

I have two theories: one is that the feline and canine eye is much more sensitive to a spot of monochromatic light, so it's really bright to them. A torch beam, emitting a wide spectrum of light, looks more like a sunny spot in a dappled shade, which their predator's eyes are more used to filtering out to find the hidden prey within.

The other is that the way it reflects, to an eye that isn't close to the beam, is distorted; so that the moving spot appears to be within the carpet or whatever. We don't see this because we're usually close to the emitter and thus see the reflection fairly close together. But that's an outside bet - I favour the former.

HTH,

Paul

Once when my aunt's cat was recovering from an anaesthetic it would stagger a bit and then turn around 360, then walk a bit then turn around again, then sit down... then repeat.... for several hours....

I once gave a couple wild mushrooms wrapped in cheese to my dog. She was hyperactive all night and kept barking at random.

My father informs me that in his misspent youth you get chickens very drunk by feeding them fermented berries

barking at random

Who is "random", friend or stranger, you can't blame the poor bugger for barking at strangers!