My Cat Is A Mime...

Today, I'm going to talk about my cat! 

Her name is Nikki and she's a pretty ordinary tabby, as far as tabbies go, in that she lives in my house and never goes outside except to see her 'friend' the vet or to move to a new house. 

 

She's seventeen years old, so she experienced the nineties in her own feline fashion and wasn't so impressed...  No Wall street speculation for Nikki or working in an office wearing sneakers to work trying to make ends meet;-)
 

The 2000's weren't much different for her either, she didn't discover new music groups that she liked or pare down her lifestyle to make herself  'lean and mean'...  In fact, that cat gained weight as the decade went on!  So much for 'doing less with more', Nikki didn't get the last decade at all!

There is one pretty strange thing about Nikki though, she has a birth defect in her vocal cords that interferes with her ability to make any sounds... 

For the first year of her life she never made a single sound at all other than scratching the appliances to hear the sound of her claws or shaking her tail on plastic to hear it rattle! 

I used to call her the 'Mime cat' because it was pretty funny to see a cat go through the motions of meowing with no audio track turned on.  Mind you, there does seem to be some sort of cosmic compensation going on here, as you can hear that cat purr from across the room!

Later on in life, she figured out ways to get around the sound issues a bit... 

Now she stretches her neck up to finally get a strangled sort of drawn out meow out when she really feels the need to be heard...  Sort of a cat version of baying at the moon.

Since it really sounds somewhat like a cat in trouble she generally gets a good reaction, so she must figure it's worth the effort...  Personally, I'd like to find her volume control and turn it back off!  She was pretty well perfect the other way as far as I was concerned!

Did you ever stop and think about cats?  I'm convinced that they see the world very differently than we do, they're pretty sure that they own us and we are staff! 

On top of that, I have a sneaking suspicion that my cat thinks that the level of service has degraded in recent years... She was pretty annoyed by moving from the west coast of Canada out to the east coast.  Nowadays, if you bring out a box and start packing it, she'll look at you like she'd like to give you a little bite to get you to stop... 

I don't blame her though, I figured it out recently and over the last seventeen years, she's moved approximately half a dozen times.  For a cat, that's a lot, they aren't the most flexible pets...  Especially if you consider that she's made the trip by truck across Canada four times!

I remember a funny joke circulating the Internet years ago that I thought was hilarious...  The joke was showing what went on in the minds of dogs and cats with regards to how they see their lives...

--> For the dog, it was all oh boy, a walk, my favourite!  Oh boy, dog food, my favourite! Oh boy... You get the idea...

For the cat, it read like a conspiracy novel! 

The cat went on and on about how the person that was keeping them prisoner was torturing them with horrible gruel while keeping all the good stuff (meat dishes) for themselves...  And on top of that, their captors were eating it in front of them!  It went on to talk about how their latest attempt at assinating their captors failed when they didn't suceed at tripping them to fall down the stairs...  It was pretty funny and I think they caught some truth there!  And I'm a dyed in the wool cat person!  HaHa!

I'm pretty sure my cat would agree!  I think my Mime cat actually thinks she's a tiger...  I'd hate to tell her she's a bit short.

Images by Teresa Young:
1. Tiger Tracks -Apr.2004,  2. Nikki Smiles - 2009,  3. Nikki in her natural state - 2009,  4. Howling (Yawning) at the moon - 2009,  5.  Nikki's Self Image - May 2010.