Howdy! My name is MAUS. I think. Sometimes the big cats call me grey critter. Sometimes they call me little bastard. I don't really care what they call me, as long as they call me when it's time for dinner. |
| I started life as a stray, but I was pretty smart. I found a decent home by hanging around this house. The big two legged cats that lived there pretty much ignored me until I showed them I was smart. One day they were carrying dead vines from the front of the house to the compost heap. When they dropped a small vine, I picked it up and carried it to the compost heap for them. I also did a few other nifty tricks, like showing them my martial arts skills (I know how to do a judo roll that can sometimes even take down one of the big two legged cats if they aren't paying attention). After a while, they started feeding me, and I started hanging out on their front patio. |
| This was a pretty cool way to live, except it got cold when it rained. Still, life was pretty good. Then I hurt my paw pretty bad. I hoped it would heal, but it must have got infected because it started getting worse. Whenever one of the big cats stepped outside, I would hold up my paw. After a couple of days of showing them it wasn't getting any better, they took me to this place with a lot of other hurt animals. They called it a "vet". I was pretty scared. All I wanted to do was to get my infected thumb fixed, and this vet guy was checking over the rest of my body. Next thing I know, I'm being drugged and he's starting to "fix" other parts of me. I tried to yell to him that it was my thumb that needed to be fixed, but he didn't seem to understand. I guess he noticed the paw problem later because when I woke up it was wrapped in bandages, too. |
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After that, I stayed inside all the time. It's not too bad,
since I don't have to worry about finding a dry spot when it
rains. I've got a lot of free time now, and I can go into any
room of the house except the network server room. My paw is
also a lot better now (it's the same one I'm using as the left
border for this page!).
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 Send me e-mail |
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| Po-kitty-cally Incorrect |
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| I'm too young to remember Bill the Cat, but I think he looks a lot like my buddy Tiger. Tiger doesn't have a hunting rifle like Bill does, but that doesn't stop him from hunting. Just the other day, he was sneaking up on a bag full of kitty treats, and not once did the bag of treats even know he was there. He also tries to attack me sometimes, using his "death from above" attack from the couch. Fortunately, I know judo, and I usually just flip him over and he runs away. I'm a pretty good hunter, too. While I don't need to hunt anymore, I used to hunt all sorts of stuff like birds and rats and opossums. Before I was an indoor cat, I trapped an opposum in the front patio, but I let it go (I wasn't hungry right then. Like the big cats, sometimes we just hunt for the sake of hunting). Some people think it is mean for us cats to hunt and eat meat, but like the big cats, there are some nutrients we can't get any other way. One thing we need is taurine, an amino acid. If we don't get it (and we can't digest it in plants) our vision gets really bad, and we could get nearsighted or go blind. Another reason we need meat is to get arachidonic acid. The big cats don't need it (they can make it from linoleic acid in vegetable oils), but we little cats must get it from meat to be healthy. We little cats can't absorb vitamin A from plants, either. And both us little cats and all you big cats should be aware that vitamin B-12 doesn't occur in plants (the form found in sea vegetables and fermented soybean products cannot be absorbed by animals and actually retards the body's ability to absorb "real" vitamin B-12). So we have to either get it from meat products or from artificial sources (like cyanocobalamin, which has a cyanide molecule attached). While you big cats will only suffer from health effects ranging from anemia to neuro-psychiatric disorders, we little cats can actually die from lack of vitamin B-12. So even if you've decided to become a vegetarian, make sure you still feed us little cats meat or cat foods made from animal products. |
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