Herding Cats

Well, the joy of having indoor/outdoor cats in the bucolic French countryside has come to an unfortunate end. Humphrey returned home one afternoon, after a leisurely stroll around the quartier with a note attached to his collar which translated loosely to : Your cat is very sweet but he is disturbing our dogs so could you please keep him inside". Needless to say, we were enjoying the ability to let the cats come and go as they please - probably akin to Scandinavian parents discovering it's perfectly legal to leave their baby in the stroller outside a restaurant while they enjoy their meal. We could leave the doors open for fresh air, there were no kung-fu cat-blocking leg motions required every time we left the house and they both were enjoying the outdoors - getting to be real "hunter" cats. (See photos of Humphrey with his first bird and one of Franklin's two million mice brought inside with varying degrees of life still in them)



We also had a more unsettling discovery regarding Franklin. He had been displaying some bizarre behavior in the litter box. He was appearing to have problems urinating - sitting in the box but doing nothing and/or going outside of the box in strange places - like the blanket on our couch - which is really unusual for cats. They are so persnickety about hygiene that any variation is a cause for concern. When he seemed unable to sit down, and was crying, we took him to a vet in Châteaudun and discovered he had blood in his urine and bladder stones. The vet indicated that the blood was indicative of poison and we have heard from our neighbor that they lost four cats in the last year due to poisoning - either a disgruntled feline-hating neighbors (cats are somewhat person non grata here, or perhaps eating a mouse that had been poisoned. Either way, with the combination of Humphrey's mystery note and Frankie's health problems (including, gulp, $45 a bag food!) we knew they had to stay inside.

We really had only a couple of options: keeping them completely inside or letting them go outside with something to keep them in the yard. We went to a pet store and inquired about an 'invisible fence' - I had read about these in the U.S. and was happy to see a version here. You run an underground wire around the perimeter of your yard and your pets wear collars that give them an increasing level of beeps and shocks as they get closer to the perimeter. The cost is close to $500 for the system, about $200 more than in the U.S.

The other (and much more affordable) option is using a harness, leashes and a long rope to keep them tethered to the house. For the moment, this seemed like the best option because we simply didn't have an extra $500 laying around. I had the clerk help me pick out harnesses, trying to explain the ginormous dimensions of my nearest and dearest, Humphrey. To the first harness I picked out, his response was, "Oh no, that is for a dog!", to which I replied, "Trust me, Monsieur, you haven't seen this cat!" Eighty dollars in cat harnesses later, we were out the door thinking our cat worries would be over - the cats could roam but not too far and we'd saved ourselves about 400 bucks.

Needless to say, the "training" did not go as expected. (Does anything, really?) Getting them (calmly) into the harness was not easy - it took practice on our part to not freak them out so they wouldn't associate being manhandled with this new form of restraint. We had the ingenious (not) idea as well to attach them to opposite ends of the same rope so that they would be push to the other's pull and when the reached the end, they would just stop. Mind you, this is a rope that can easily reach from the back of the house to the front. Seemed foolproof enough. What I wasn't expecting was that I was dealing with two little Houdinis. Ten semi-supervised minutes into the first outing, we two discovered expensive harnesses devoid of two wily cats. They had disappeared with nary a trace or signs of struggle (or even photo of them holding up an edition of today's newspaper). Our "set it and forget it" method of cat training had not worked.

As time has gone on, we have been able to get Humphrey to hang out resistance-free on the harness, but Frankie has been a lost cause. We have slowly allowed him to reclaim his role of the petit chasseur - the little hunter - (to wit: he has brought in three mice - two dead and one squeakingly alive - in the course of writing this entry) but we keep on eye on him and go look for him after he has been out awhile. Patrice is also completely pleased with himself and his (legend in his own mind) cat training because, ala Dr. Doolittle, he tells Frankie to be back in 20 minutes and sure enough, 20 minutes later there is Franklin. "Dressage, mon coeur, dressage," he tells me, "Je suis un professionnel". "Training, my darling, training. I am a professional." Hopefully as time goes on we can find that nice inside/outside mix of safe, but happy, cats.