MORAL IN ADVANCE: DON’T PUT DOG FLEA STUFF ON YOUR CAT, OKAY LADY?
I have mentioned the nice garden lady, Kathy. So nice! Today she was waiting at the door before we opened, because her cat had been scratching at fleas around 10 last night and she had grabbed any old package of scary neurotoxic flea medicine and put it all over her cat. But GOLLY—it was for a dog of 100 pounds! So, her cat went crazy and was found in a shivering heap in the morning. She washed it later with (soap free!) baby shampoo. So it was still very twitchy, because still covered in neurotoxic medicine. We needed to bathe it with actual detergent, but it was just bananas and very angry about everything, so here’s what that looked like: the cat was in the (raised to hip level) tub, leash around neck, on a flat metal gridded rack. Doc held the end of the leash way high in the air so the cat could stand on the rack but not get a running start to head somewhere else, and used her other hand to spray the cat with water, then Dawn, then water. I held up a big towel and used it to stop the cat from flailing out of the tub into our faces or escaping and killing us some other way. Sometimes the cat just jammed its head into my towel and made murder noises, and sometimes it leapt all over the tub, swinging by the leash attached to Doc. Spray flail screech headbutt spray quiet spray flail whee!
In the end, no one was hurt (except for how the cat had terrible neurotoxicity for 11 hours before she got to us)! And the cat stopped twitching almost immediately after we got her back in her cage to dry off. What a fun lesson for the day: we can almost kill cats, and then they will almost kill us.
interlexionality 