Now, For Something Completely Different …

by Bryan

4 comments

1 Badtux { 05.18.11 at 2:32 am }

Anybody who expects a cat to jump into the water and save them has watched too many Lassie movies and not noticed that, err, Lassie isn’t a cat :). If Lassie had been a cat and Timmy had fallen in the well, Lassie woulda looked down at Timmy and said, “Eh”, and walked away to lick his paw and watch random leaves blow across the lawn.

– Badtux the Cat-realist Penguin

2 Badtux { 05.18.11 at 2:34 am }

BTW, cats can generally swim reasonably well. But it’s also generally not their favorite activity. I won’t tell you how I know that cats can swim reasonably well. Let’s just say that I was really curious as a kid :).

3 Badtux { 05.18.11 at 10:09 am }

And just for a third note — if said cats had *not* swum well, I would of course have jumped into the pond and helped them out despite the likely bloodshed, 12-year-old me didn’t relish that possibility but had done it before with a stupid Lab mix who didn’t know he was supposed to be a retriever dog that liked to swim (said dog jumped into the pond chasing old bread I threw, and started thrashing madly like a drowning swimmer so I jumped in and pulled him out, annoying me greatly since I then had to go home and take a quick shower and change clothes to get the bayou stink off of me, what kinda Lab doesn’t swim, other than a meth lab?!). And with an outside temperature of 100F+ and 100% humidity, the notion of the cat getting chilled (rather than merely annoyed) from his impromptu dunk in the pond was a nonstarter. Whadya think I am, a sociopath?

In case you’re wondering — cats dogpaddle. Or shall we say, “catpaddle”?

– Badtux the Curious Penguin

4 Bryan { 05.18.11 at 10:18 pm }

There are some breeds, like the Turkish Van, that are known for swimming, and individual cats, like CC like the water.

As a child our resident cat, Cat, would supplement her diet with whatever she could catch in the shallows of the bayou – she didn’t enjoy it, as such, but it was another place to kill something.

We always have a few incidents every year of a cat falling into my Mother’s water garden.

I’m just amazed that the cat tolerates the life jacket. Sox would just go catatonic if I did that to him, and he would be the only one I could attempt it with. He does that when I put his harness on him. He doesn’t object, he just “melts”.