When I brought three kittens home last Autumn, one could argue that I had not really thought it through. What started off as tiny little bundles of fur suddenly grew fiercely into furiously hungry felines, who prowl around the home as if I am their lodger. They claim the sofa for their own, use the rugs as scratching posts, and my feet are their mortal enemies.
What my feet ever did wrong I will never know.
Six months on the cats are now part of the family. The incontinent part of the family admittedly, as none of them seem to have the sense to understand that the toilet is in the garden. Their unwillingness to let go of the litter tray is borderline obsessive, and on the rare occasion that I have moved the tray out of sight they have simply crapped on the floor.
And rumour was cats are such clean animals…
Their habits include sleeping, snoozing, and killing pigeons. If we are especially lucky they will bring in a wing or a foot for family show and tell, and leave it somewhere helpful, like on a bed or just outside a bedroom door.
I have read on the internet that this is called a gift.
Someone needs to tell my cats that flowers make a nice present, a bloody foot or a savaged wing is simply uncalled for.
Then this week we had an extra treat….
“Mum,” bellowed Molly, my nine-year old girl, “Mum, come quick, Mittens is ill, dying even.”
Molly has a taste for the dramatic so I presumed this to mean that Mittens, one of the kittens, had simply sneezed.
But curious I came out of my office and bent down to stroke the cat, who looked perfectly fine and not in the least bit ill.
“Look,” pointed Molly and she gestured to Mittens right leg.
Curiously, amongst a sea of black fur protruded what could only be described as a white blob. Soft to touch, impossible to pull out, just a white blob.
“What is it?” sobbed Molly.
“Expensive” I muttered before I could restrain myself… Then I quickly followed up with, “I’m not sure, I’ll Google later or ask on Facebook.”
I know calling a vet may have been a better idea but Google never fails me with its medical prowess and Facebook simply provides an evening’s entertainment with the random diagnosis’ you can be offered from people who have never even seen the offending white blob.
As is was, I didn’t even need Google. A friend popped by later who took a look and said…
“Tick”
to which I helpfully said,
“Tock?”
With a look of irritation she tossed me my phone and said Google it.
Oh my God – Ticks are real and disgusting.
For anyone who doesn’t know what a tick is (I can’t be alone), let me explain and save you the horror of Googling it. It is a beast of a bug, that burrows its head and feet into your cat’s body, fills itself up with blood and then drops off and lays thousands of eggs in your home until your house becomes a orphanage for baby blood sucking blobs.
Google said we had to get rid, and Facebook concurred.
The friend was helpful, ‘burn it’ she said, ‘get a match, light it and poke the blob. It will jump out and then we can kill it.’
I am not the best with animals, I confess I didn’t know what a tick was, but even I know that fire and fur is unlikely to end well.
So I refused and got my best straight-edged tweezers out and had a go at yanking the fecker out.
It would seem Mittens blood is pretty damn tasty because that tick was buried in an all you can drink buffet and no amount of tweezing was bringing him out. Rather like that persistent hair on my chin that seems to evade the steel tweezers whenever I press them near.
So we moved to plan b.
I went to bed, dreamt of blood sucking blobs devouring me and the kids in our sleep and got up in the morning, drove to Pets At Home and purchased a tick remover….
Yes, as well as ticks exist, so do remover sticks… That is a win for the human race,
I spent the day at work fretting that i would return home and the blob would have already dropped off and be off leaving its babies all over my home. In my mind’s eye I could see my home slowly being swallowed by a wall of blobs and the cats being covered in shivering white ticks.
I have no idea where Molly gets her taste for the dramatic from by the way.
Finally I got home, to sleeping kids, a tick infested cat and my estranged spouse who had had the kids for the night. Who was totally unaware that he was about to be promoted from being called he who helped create them to he who helped kill the tick. I waggled the plastic tick remover under his eyes and said ‘please help’ in my best estranged wife voice. I could see he wasn’t keen but when I explained that next time he came to visit he would have to battle through scores of ticks who had moved in and were reproducing daily in a gremlin and water fashion. It was then he grabbed the cat and muttered ‘go on then…’
So I began,
The tick remover went over the tick and I trapped its horrid blood filled belly between two bits of wire. I turned and pulled.
The cat whined,
He who helped kill the tick moaned as the cat bit down,
The tick…
Well the tick finally let go of its prey and suddenly flew out of Mittens leg and out of the tick removers grasp and tumbled through the air finally resting on the husbands jeans. He promptly shrieked and leapt to his feet leaving the tick to go flying once more and land in destination unknown, somewhere on my very fluffy rug.
Marital separation is hard enough without a tick coming between you!
Although I think for one of the first times since we agreed to go our separate ways we managed to laugh in the same room.
Who would have thought a tick could have managed that…..
If you want to know, we found the tick, head intact, some thirty minutes later. It was probably one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen.
Just in case you were thinking about getting a cat….
oh God. Max got them last year on Dartmoor. I had to check every inch of his body to get them out. Every inch.
(For other readers, Max is neither, cat nor dog but husband).