dog & cats

Flash chews on her butt. Not her butthole. No. But just this side of her tail. Sometimes she'll walk by and there'll be this wet tousled spot, like some creature is riding her pelvis. She hasn't chewed herself raw this year. Not yet. Hoping she won't. We buy the hella expensive flea stuff, the topical that supposedly kills every flea within shouting distance for a month and the internal that renders infertile those fleas that didn't hear the shouting. But she gets itchy anyway. She probably picks up fleas outside -- a few bites and her skin bothers her.

We treat the cats, too. I've seen Sutra stop suddenly and bite himself. I haven't noticed any bites on myself. But Kent said he caught a flea a week or so ago. And I think I saw one, maybe.

Last weekend I bought new cat toys to enrich their environment. The cats spend the night and our workday shut inside and haven't had anything new to pounce on in ages. I got two clear plastic balls, about golf ball size, one having a plastic fish skeleton inside that spins, the other having paddles around which tiny balls cascade. Kent saw that the balls always maintain a distance from each other, so they must be magnetic opposites. Also bought a ball that's made of some sort of foil, looks a bit like a chrysanthemum. Sundy likes to bite plastic and foil. The pet store had lots of catnip toys, but when the cats were kittens and we offered them a catnippy something they were uninterested, so I didn't buy anything with catnip. However, there's a bulk herb-spice store that I pass on the way home from work so I stopped in today and bought a half ounce of catnip. We wrapped it up in a rag, tied it shut with a rubber band & wire twist tie. A few minutes ago Kent showed me how dampened it is. Making Sundy slobber? So Sundance has played with the toys. Sutra seems mostly suspicious, if not altogether fearful. This evening he walked by the catnip toy on the floor, sniffed it, but seemed to find the smell disconcerting and jumped away, skirting the toy by several feet to get out of the room.