Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Stressed kitties

It’s easy to forget that animals involved in moving from one house to another are affected—maybe more so than the humans (who presumably made the decision to move and understand or at least have advance warning of the chaos involved). So I’m not altogether surprised that my three kitties are showing signs of stress.

Our house has been on the market since the third weekend in September. Nine months later, we may have sold the house. But in that time, we’ve had easily eight open houses and close to 20 showings. Any way you slice it, that’s a whole lot of strangers coming in and out of the house, freaking out the resident kitties.

Yesterday I took the cats to the vet to get their yearly shots—I wanted to get the immunizations done here in Kansas City where I know the vet, the vet knows the cats and if the cats are going to have any weird reactions, they can do it here before we head out for a very long car ride. I have three soft sided carriers which you can see here on the right. The carriers are perfect for short trips since I can actually carry all three of them at once, and it’s pretty easy to get the cats into the carriers. Whoever designed these is very clever, there are mesh ventilation panels on all four sides and you can configure the straps a bunch of different ways to best support the weight of the animal inside.

Well they all squirmed and made their noises (Eddie yowled, Chloe cried, and Wally hissed and spat—very true to form for each of them). We got to the vet, got them weighed and poked and then back in their bags they went for the trip home.

I happened to catch a glimpse in my rear view mirror of something . . . wait a minute, it was a kitty head! An Eddie kitty head. Yep, he’d managed to push on one of the zippers enough to get it to open and out he popped.

But today as I was running around the house, I noticed that Wally had found a safe spot in one of the carriers. This picture is dark and grainy because I took it with my phone's camera. I managed to get one with the real camera but it's too bright and washes out his little face. So I went with this picture. I wish I knew what he was thinking—he looks very weary and wary. Poor kitties. Poor humans.

I can’t wait for July to get here.

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