Ornoth

Monday marks Grady the Cat’s first adoptaversary. I really haven’t written about him or posted any pictures since his first couple weeks at home. That’s partly due to my five-month travel assignment.

I have taken pictures of him, but he’s not as photogenic as I once hoped, mostly because he’s not a very patient subject, so few of them have made it to Flickr or my LJ. You can see the ones I have taken here.

How can I describe life with Grady? In many ways, it’s great. He’s not a fussy eater. He doesn’t scratch furniture. He’s usually not noisy or destructive. He doesn’t have litterbox issues. He doesn’t spray or mark. He’s a pretty good cat, in all respects but one.

He’s one aggressive muthafuxx0r.

You’d think a cat would enjoy spending time sunbathing in a south-facing bay window in a fancy Back Bay apartment, watching all the pedestrian activity on shi-shi Newbury Street. He’s even got sparrows, pigeons, and seagulls to stare and chatter at when he gets bored.

But no. My cat’s got ennui. No, not just ennui; my cat’s got ANGST. Angst like Arlo Guthrie on the Group W bench: he wants ta kill. I mean, he wants ta kill. He wants ta see blood and gore and guts and veins in his teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. He wants ta kill, Kill, KILL, KILL!

Unfortunately, the only other living thing in my apartment happens to be *me*, and I’m not about to become “prey” to any twelve-pound ball of teh fluffeh, even if he does have nasty big pointy teeth. It’s kind of a pity, because he’d be an ideal farm cat, where he could go out and run and hunt and kill all day and all night long.

So after a year, during which time I’ve utterly failed to train this behavior out of him, I finally called for an exorcist. Today a Senior Applied Animal Behaviorist came by—along with two veterinary student observers—and we talked about Grady’s “case”.

Basically, the diagnosis is boredom combined with an inhuman—or infeline—amount of energy. They played with him for ten minutes, the point at which point most cats will get tired and go for a lay-down. After 80 more minutes of vigorous, non-stop play the Senior Applied Animal Behaviorist got tired and declared that Grady is “ninety-ninth percentile”, and that he’ll remain this hyperactive for a minimum five more years.

Meanwhile, I got all kinds of advice. A lot of it is geared toward finding ways to entertain and exercise him, so that he has an outlet for all this satanic energy other than mad killing sprees. We also discussed deterrence, drugs, and acquiring other living creatures for him to disembowel, ranging in sizes from crickets up to fostered shelter cats. The idea is to redirect his persistent demands for human sacrifices.

In the end, only time is going to tell whether I can live with this killing machine or not. But at least now I’ve some well-educated support and some ideas to try. Wish me luck…