It's a Cat's Life

It's a Cat's Life

Peggy Elliott plays with Sheriff

It's A Cat's Life

by Peggy Elliott

From the Editor: Having just enjoyed a little story that talks about mice,

you now have an opportunity to consider cats. The following story is reprinted

from Remember to Feed the Kittens, the sixteenth in the NFB's Kernel Book series

of paperbacks intended to educate the public about blindness. Peggy Elliott

tackles the job from a slightly different perspective. The article begins with

President Maurer's introduction.

Doug and Peggy Elliott are both blind and live in Grinnell, Iowa. When they

invited a tiny blind kitten to join them and their two sighted older cats awhile

ago, they told Kernel Book readers about little Sheriff and her insistence on

being left alone to explore and do for herself. Now Peggy, who also serves as

Second Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind, brings us up

to date on the growing blind cat, Sheriff.

Although it's hard to say for sure what Sheriff's adventures tell us about

blindness, there is no question what they tell us about the Elliott household:

it's a great place to be a cat! And perhaps it only stands to reason that a

blind cat would try to make the same adaptations to cat life as a blind human

does to human living. In any case, for cat lovers it is a delightful story.

Here is what Peggy has to say:

Our little blind kitten has grown into

a nine-pound teenager, tomboy, and endless source of amusement and pleasure.

When we last reported about Sheriff, she was a newcomer to our house, recently

retrieved from the vet who had cured all her outside-kitty parasites and given

us soothing ointment for her infected eyes. Soothing is all we could do; Sheriff

cannot see.

This has never bothered Sheriff. She's

constantly busy. Most cats play with an object for a while and then lose it.

Sheriff picks favorite toys and keeps them around for weeks. The most recent

one is a mouse with a bell on its tail. She'll smack it, chase it down, capture

it, and smack again. When the game is over for a time, she'll leave it.

The thing about her, though, is that she

remembers where. Later you'll see her carrying it in her mouth to a new hockey

area or hear the bell jingling in another room. Now we think one of the older

cats has finally stolen and hidden the mouse. But Sheriff always finds another

toy.

Cellophane packages are another favorite,

and Wednesday grocery day with all the fresh sacks on the floor is a highlight

of the week for Sheriff. She hasn't done this for awhile, but she used to find

a sack, put her front paws and shoulders in, lie down, and push herself and

the sack forward while making a prrt prrt prrt sound for all the world like

a little feline motorboat. When the sack would hit the cabinets and stop, she

would go to find another and repeat the process.

Toys are an important part of Sheriff's

day. Of course anything she plays with has to make or create sound. I think

it's fair to say her very favorite toys are Doug and me.

When she was tiny, Sheriff spent hours

climbing up and down the ladders on our ladderbacked kitchen chairs. When she

would reach the top, she would balance there, all four feet on the top rung,

very pleased with herself and sometimes bold enough to bat at a passing human

toy.

She's too big now to do this climbing

act; she'd just knock the chair over if she tried. So she's modified the game.

Now she puts her back feet on the seat of an empty chair and her front paws

on the top rung. She positions herself there when a human toy is going to pass

and then bats out at you, swatting accurately at Doug or me as we pass.

It's amazing what Sheriff can find that

fits the sound-making toy bill. One of us got a small electrical appliance,

a tape recorder or something, that came packed in Styrofoam peanuts. We already

knew about Sheriff's love of peanuts. They make nice scratching sounds as they

move across a surface.

This particular box with the peanuts got

set under the bed in our bedroom and forgotten. Little Sheriff is always looking

at her world and the details of her world with her paws. She goes places and

finds stuff the two older cats never do. One day she found the box.

The first we knew about Sheriff's discovery

was when she arrived on the bed with a peanut and began hitting it around, chasing

it, pouncing, hitting, all while two humans were trying to get a little sleep.

One of us took the peanut away and put

it under a pillow as a temporary fix. Sheriff followed the sound of the peanut

and looked with her paws on and then around and then under the pillow. The peanut

was too far under for her to find.

A little dejected (we thought) Sheriff

hopped off the bed and, after a little time had passed, began batting another

Styrofoam peanut around the floor. I can't even begin to tell you how annoying

the sound of a Styrofoam peanut and a joyful cat can be in the middle of the

night. This went on for days.

I don't know how many times she kept us

awake playing on the floor and how many times we got bounced by her frisking

on the bed and how many Styrofoam peanuts we confiscated before we found the

forgotten box.

And the little creep was clever enough

to get the next one only after a pause so that we weren't sure what the distance

was from her supply to the torture chamber that the bedroom had become while

she had access to the endless supply. It's gone now, and we're careful to throw

all peanuts away the minute they come in the house. She loves them as toys,

but we like our sleep more.

It is constantly interesting to watch

Sheriff exploring her environment. We got a new couch and love seat a few weeks

ago, and Sheriff was immediately there, feeling, jumping, using her paws to

see the outlines.

She's the first cat of our three that

found that the backs are wide and padded enough to accommodate a sprawled, sleeping

cat comfortably. She's appropriated the love seat as hers, and I've never seen

either older cat up there.

When she was still a kitten, Sheriff showed

us that she has a clear map of the world around her in her mind. We had a recliner

set at right angles to a couch, with a coffee table in front of the couch. Sheriff

would get on Doug's knee in the recliner, reach out with her paw to find the

edge of the coffee table, hop to the table, and then hop to the couch.

After a while, we decided the coffee table

was too much in that setting and removed it. For weeks thereafter Sheriff would

get on Doug's knee, reach for the edge of the coffee table, reach farther, lean

way out, wave around with her paw. She was convinced for a long time that she

just wasn't reaching far enough since she knew there was a surface there. She's

stopped doing it now, but she did it so many times we had to conclude that she

really remembered the table.

Sheriff is not afraid to try new routes.

In an area she is not sure about, she checks with a paw before stepping. But

then she remembers the pattern for later. Our front stairs turn twice, and our

back stairs turn once. At the top and bottom of both, one must pick angles to

arrive at different locations.

Sheriff has taken to racing people up

and down the stairs and winning. In the morning she waits at the top of the

front stairs, usually used by the first person up. When one of us starts down,

she leaps into motion, races ahead, and invariably beats us to the kitchen.

She's running all the way.

We tied a string on a knob of my dresser

as a cat toy. Neither older cat has to my knowledge so much as looked at the

string. For about nine months the string formed part of Sheriff's morning ritual.

She would flop down on the floor under the string and commence to swat, bite,

kick, and roll in reaction to and activation of the string.

The game would last for ten to fifteen

minutes a day, and she kept this up for about nine months. She's tired of that

game now and doesn't do it anymore. But it's clear that she intentionally went

to the string each morning, knowing where it was and how to play the game.

Once Sheriff got caught in a little dead-end

hallway off the main upstairs hall. GirlKitty (one of the older cats) was standing

at the mouth of the dead-end, growling at her. I stepped over GirlKitty and

started downstairs.

Then it occurred to me that there was

a reason why GirlKitty, the only Sheriff hater I know, was growling. She was

penning Sheriff in the dead-end. I stopped about three steps down and reached

through the widely-spaced rails into the dead-end. Sheriff was sitting right

on the edge. I petted her and went on down a few more stairs. Then I heard Sheriff

flop onto the stairs. She had figured out that, if I was there, she could be

there too.

She didn't quite know the distances,

but she did know that she had been trapped and that I had showed her, she thought,

a way out. She hasn't taken that route since, but she was braver at trying than

I probably would have been with the same information she had.

Speaking of how Sheriff thinks reminds

me of the shrimp. We were having boiled shrimp one night, and we decided to

put an empty bowl over the tails in the tail bowl as a protection against marauding

cats. All three know they are not supposed to be on the table and steal food,

but, well, you know cats.

If you leave an unusually juicy morsel

unguarded, you have to take your chances. So we devised the tail bowl protector

to save ourselves the trouble. First we heard the bowl being investigated and

moved a bit, followed by a disappointed Bobby (the other older cat) leaving

the table with his trademark "prrrt" as he jumps. Then the sounds

were repeated followed by the more clumsy and non-verbal exit of GirlKitty.

Then no sound for awhile.

Doug reached over to put a tail in the

bowl and discovered little Sheriff industriously working on uncracking the puzzle.

She had examined the container with the good smells very carefully with her

front paws and had gotten one paw in between the lips of the two bowls. When

Doug happened to reach over, Sheriff had the two bowls separated and was working

her nose into the widening gap.

She had unlocked the puzzle neither older,

sighted cat had had the patience or persistence to deconstruct and was about

to graze upon the ambrosia easily withheld from both older cats. Though I don't

specifically remember, I can guess that either Doug or I rewarded her persistence

after we removed her from the table.

Then there are the dropped things in

the kitchen. When a human is in the kitchen, Sheriff is usually there too, just

in case. She wouldn't want to withhold an opportunity from a human to give her

treats. To be fair, she usually hangs around one of us wherever we are. But

back to the kitchen.

Anything you drop, from an ice cube to

a spoon to a few kernels of frozen corn escaped from the bag, anything--if Sheriff

is in the kitchen, she will probably find it more quickly than we do. The minute

something hits the floor, she leaps into action, using her ears and her knowledge

of the kitchen to run right to the dropped thing and kill it.

She seems to understand that these things

are not usually subject to the game of cat hockey. It's just a mere matter of

finding. And she likes to race to the dropped object, being the first to find

it. She's even come tearing in from the dining room, around the refrigerator

and into the end of the kitchen to find something.

Now that we know the game, it's a matter

of pride to find the dropped thing before the cat does. But I would say that

the score is about fifty-fifty, even though the human doing the dropping is

usually closer when the drop occurs. Sheriff's good.

The most fun thing of all about Sheriff,

though, is her intense conviction that she can communicate. Some of the communication,

of course, deals with food. We recycle cans after washing them in the dishwasher

and store them in the back hallway for the weekly city pick-up. When Sheriff

was quite little, she dug an empty, dishwashed tuna can out of the recycling

bin and carried it over to Doug's feet, dropping it there as a statement of

desire.

Sheriff has never repeated that ploy since it didn't work. But when someone

opens the refrigerator, you may find Sheriff there, standing on her back legs

and touching the tuna can sitting on the second shelf at the left. She is always

ready to let us know just where it is.

Sheriff also knows that her bell gives

her away. Most of the time you can hear the bell merrily ringing as Sheriff

trots along or rolls over during a nap. Sometimes you'd swear she's intentionally

ringing the bell louder when she's happy and running around. But there are other

times when the bell goes silent. Then you find a little cat nose or paw where

it's not supposed to be.

As I say, Sheriff is certain she can communicate

her wishes. She likes to snuggle down in bed against one of us for the night.

She has a favorite place next to Doug, and she's sometimes ready for sleep before

we are. Every now and then we'll be talking, and a sleepy paw will appear very

gently on Doug's mouth. The message is clear.