Our mama cat, Easy, spends a good deal of time each day playing whoop ass with her kittens. It is play, but it is intense and seems to be something that may be the result of boredom or negative feelings of some sort (hard to read a cat). Anyway, she stalks them, pounces on them, gets their upper bodies in a half nelson and pummels them with her back legs. They squeal a little and run off when they get free, but no real harm is ever done although it looks and sounds bad and occasionally we can't bear it and distract her so that she lets the kitten go.
This seems to be a way Easy gets out some negative feelings and I wonder if we shouldn't practice it more often, too. I have never seen her really hurt one of her kittens or even get seriously angry with them. She always lets them have her food if they horn in on it, she continues to lick and clean them and they her, and she loves to play with them. She is in all respects a great mom, but she practices whoop ass religiously. We have been told this is good for the kittens: it teaches them manners and boundaries around other cats. In fact someone told me recently that an orphaned kitten was getting a little mean so the veterinarian told the owner to put the kitten in a towel and rough it up some, like a mother cat would do. But I also wonder if it isn't good for the mother cat, too: a way to deal with stuff that just builds up inside--for whatever reason--through hard, rough PLAY.
I guess sports are a way for us humans to do this, and probably humor, too. This kind of rough play reminds me of when Inspector Clouseau would come home and Cato would, cat-like, pounce on him and they would do battle.
We all have negative emotions, be they from anxiety or boredom, and we all get irritated with life, with each other. I know prayer is a great way to deal with these feelings but I also think we need, once again, to watch how the animals work out these things and learn from them. Rather than denying, ignoring or feeling guilty about these bad feelings we need to find a way to play Whoop Ass with each other, especially with the people we live with be it husbands and wives, siblings, or parents and children. Finding a safe but real way to "bark" at each other and clear the air so that we don't carry around the bad feelings day after day and either end up avoiding each other or hurting each other through passive aggression. So, how might you play Whoop Ass???
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Kittenzen: Play
So, this is a blog about life after Buffalo... I lived there for 23 years, first as a graduate student, then as a policing researcher, then as the Director of the University at Buffalo's Regional Community Policing Center. All that time I came to love the city and its people. More about that later....
I moved back home to Tacoma, Washington in 2007 and married a friend from youth group that I had known 30 years ago and re-met at my brother's church in late 2006 when my mother died and I was home to act as her executor. More about my family later....
To the heart of the matter: kittens. A starving young cat wandered into our backyard Sunday July 13, 2012. We brought her in and fed her, named her Easy (after 2 songs: Easy Like Sunday Morning and I'm Easy) and two days later it looked like she had a balloon inside her belly....One trip to the vet later and 4 kittens are on the way! 3 weeks lateron August 8th Easy gives birth at 6:30am while we are home, fortunately, to 5 kittens. More about that later....
Kittens make play out of everything. And it is not just the job of the kittens' "guardian" (the term true cat lovers use rather than "owner") to feed them and clean their litter. PLAY is the main job of the kittens and they have taught us that is really our main purpose, too: to devise new forms of play each day (they are constantly looking for new experiences and spaces) and to turn the ordinary events of our lives into play.
Cleaning the litter box one day, the largest of the kittens, Great White, heard the shaking sound of the litter scooper and rushed to help me clean by batting the litter out of the scoop while the smallest kitten, Smokey, sat on my bare toes and lightly bit them. Irritated at first, I couldn't help laughing at the tickling and then started guffawing uncontrollably. My husband came into the mud room to find me on my butt on the floor nearly unable to breathe as I laughed.
Our lives have been changed by these happenstance little creatures and they are teaching us just by their way of being.
I moved back home to Tacoma, Washington in 2007 and married a friend from youth group that I had known 30 years ago and re-met at my brother's church in late 2006 when my mother died and I was home to act as her executor. More about my family later....
To the heart of the matter: kittens. A starving young cat wandered into our backyard Sunday July 13, 2012. We brought her in and fed her, named her Easy (after 2 songs: Easy Like Sunday Morning and I'm Easy) and two days later it looked like she had a balloon inside her belly....One trip to the vet later and 4 kittens are on the way! 3 weeks lateron August 8th Easy gives birth at 6:30am while we are home, fortunately, to 5 kittens. More about that later....
Kittens make play out of everything. And it is not just the job of the kittens' "guardian" (the term true cat lovers use rather than "owner") to feed them and clean their litter. PLAY is the main job of the kittens and they have taught us that is really our main purpose, too: to devise new forms of play each day (they are constantly looking for new experiences and spaces) and to turn the ordinary events of our lives into play.
Cleaning the litter box one day, the largest of the kittens, Great White, heard the shaking sound of the litter scooper and rushed to help me clean by batting the litter out of the scoop while the smallest kitten, Smokey, sat on my bare toes and lightly bit them. Irritated at first, I couldn't help laughing at the tickling and then started guffawing uncontrollably. My husband came into the mud room to find me on my butt on the floor nearly unable to breathe as I laughed.
Our lives have been changed by these happenstance little creatures and they are teaching us just by their way of being.
Kittenzen: Boredom
Kittens want new experiences every day, no, they NEED new experiences every day or they start creating them on their own with your stuff. So we have taken to changing the spaces in our small home to give them new geography to explore. Simply taking the sheets off the bed and leaving the rumpled quilt on it for the day before we put new sheets on gives them a new play area.
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ [That by the way, was our kitten Mallory's contribution to the blog.] We have a box we got at Costco that has an opening in the side which we turned over for them to use as a cave and every now and then I create a new hole for them. The other day I put a hole in the top and when our kitten Jane jumped on top of it she fell into the hole...
So the other day Mark and I were out walking in the rain on the Chehalis Western bike trail near our house. He had had an irritating morning and we were talking about it (constantly losing things like the mail key in our small house and musing about what would happen in a larger space). He spied a path across a field off the trail that we had never taken, so we took it and wound up at an abandoned home that had a good structure but had been totally trashed inside (copper wire removed, glass broken, etc.). We walked around the house and then took another trail into the surrounding woods. I asked Mark if he was happy now and he said, "Why, yes, I am." "Ah," I said, "you are just like the kittens. You get bored with the same thing every day and need new experiences every day to keep you happy." (I did remark about not being able to make any new holes for him, though....)
Some of us are like dogs and we are happy with the same thing every day--routine makes us happy. But some of us are like kittens and we need new spaces to explore and new experiences whether they be mental or physical or we get bored and start destroying stuff. Probably more accurately we all have both needs to varying degrees. My mother always told me "watch the cats: they know how to live." We are mom. We are.
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ [That by the way, was our kitten Mallory's contribution to the blog.] We have a box we got at Costco that has an opening in the side which we turned over for them to use as a cave and every now and then I create a new hole for them. The other day I put a hole in the top and when our kitten Jane jumped on top of it she fell into the hole...
So the other day Mark and I were out walking in the rain on the Chehalis Western bike trail near our house. He had had an irritating morning and we were talking about it (constantly losing things like the mail key in our small house and musing about what would happen in a larger space). He spied a path across a field off the trail that we had never taken, so we took it and wound up at an abandoned home that had a good structure but had been totally trashed inside (copper wire removed, glass broken, etc.). We walked around the house and then took another trail into the surrounding woods. I asked Mark if he was happy now and he said, "Why, yes, I am." "Ah," I said, "you are just like the kittens. You get bored with the same thing every day and need new experiences every day to keep you happy." (I did remark about not being able to make any new holes for him, though....)
Some of us are like dogs and we are happy with the same thing every day--routine makes us happy. But some of us are like kittens and we need new spaces to explore and new experiences whether they be mental or physical or we get bored and start destroying stuff. Probably more accurately we all have both needs to varying degrees. My mother always told me "watch the cats: they know how to live." We are mom. We are.
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