Getting outside
I've been hoping that at some point Lucy (my cat) would want to go outside and experience more of life than the 3600 square feet she's been living in. I've previously opened doors and tried to entice her outside, but she hasn't been interested. The most I could get her to do would be to hunker down and peer outside in a curious, but incredibly timid way.
That's why I was so happy tonight when Lucy made overtures of being interested in going outside. She was sitting in front of the sliding glass door and peering out -- something she never did before. I opened the back door to the deck and she almost immediately, though timidly, inched onto the deck. At that point I was expecting her to immediately want to turn around and come back in, but she didn't. Instead she started moving towards the stairs and the darkness.
But, before I would let her out for a long and unsupervised excursion, I wanted to get her collar on (with ID tag). When she headed over towards the stairs, I decided that I needed to get her back inside and put her collar on.
Putting the collar on was far easier than I expected, but watching her try to lick the (rather large) ID tag off of her chest was absolutely hilarious. It's basically just under her observable limit. She knows it's there, but can't tell where it is. She would lick at it, then get up and look at where she had been sitting, expecting to see it there. She would turn in circles looking for it. She was rolling around on the floor, curling up in a ball trying to figure out where it was. She was trying to grab it with one paw, then two. Words just can't do it justice -- it was quite entertaining.
I'm hoping that by tomorrow she'll be used to it, and that it will still be on, and I can feel a bit more confident about letting her outside. On the bright (or maybe bad, I haven't decided yet), the bell and ID tag banging together on the collar mean that I won't have a hard time figuring out where she is, or if she's scratching an itch. :-)
That's why I was so happy tonight when Lucy made overtures of being interested in going outside. She was sitting in front of the sliding glass door and peering out -- something she never did before. I opened the back door to the deck and she almost immediately, though timidly, inched onto the deck. At that point I was expecting her to immediately want to turn around and come back in, but she didn't. Instead she started moving towards the stairs and the darkness.
But, before I would let her out for a long and unsupervised excursion, I wanted to get her collar on (with ID tag). When she headed over towards the stairs, I decided that I needed to get her back inside and put her collar on.
Putting the collar on was far easier than I expected, but watching her try to lick the (rather large) ID tag off of her chest was absolutely hilarious. It's basically just under her observable limit. She knows it's there, but can't tell where it is. She would lick at it, then get up and look at where she had been sitting, expecting to see it there. She would turn in circles looking for it. She was rolling around on the floor, curling up in a ball trying to figure out where it was. She was trying to grab it with one paw, then two. Words just can't do it justice -- it was quite entertaining.
I'm hoping that by tomorrow she'll be used to it, and that it will still be on, and I can feel a bit more confident about letting her outside. On the bright (or maybe bad, I haven't decided yet), the bell and ID tag banging together on the collar mean that I won't have a hard time figuring out where she is, or if she's scratching an itch. :-)
posted by Mark at 10:03 PM
3 Comments:
Do you have her ID chipped? It's a great thing especially if she's sucessful getting the collar/tag off once she's outside and she gets picked up.
Nope, no chip. I thought about it, but remembered a friend's story (when he worked at the Humane Society in CA) of cats and dogs with chips never actually being scanned, so they were adopted out instead of having their owners notified. This all came out when a show dog had this happen to it and a big fight ensued over if the adoption was legal or not.
My dog is chipped. His chip doesn't always scan, though :(. So even if you were lucky enough for her to get picked up by someone who would scan her, it may not work.
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