h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Having just become a member of a five cat community, I simply want to say that I find Rossi's desire for asparagus rather weird (where, indeed, Rossi is a cat).

Y.

(And sorry if this comes out a double post...)

Another one!

My little street urchin Azar (rescue cat I took in 11 years ago) has always adored asparagus! I discovered this one day whilst making lunch, shortly after I'd brought him home.

I'd left a plate of freshly steamed asparagus on the dining room table while I went back into the kitchen to get the rest of the lunch. And when I got back that little so-and-so had dragged most of the asparagus out of the dish and was happily munching away.

He doesn't like any other veg - have tried him with steamed broccoli and other stuff - and no way. And he doesn't even like 'human food' as such. For example, my other cat Sunny will scream like a banshee if we ever open a tin of sardines or tuna, but Azar couldn't care less. But he does love his asparagus and when he smells it cooking starts meowing and spinning around like a lunatic until he gets his four small one-inch pieces (any more results in a huge mess in the cat box later on).

Curious.

az

With my Cat Emma it's popcorn, you have to kkep giving her handfulls of it or she won't leave you alone, she'll eat all kinds except toffee

Just found this conversation - !

I have my own weird cats - Lester...well, where to start? He was found as a stray, wandering about in a field. They think he'd had a bang on the head, and I can believe it . A sweeter, more loving fellow you couldn't hope to find, but he takes a long time to learn anything, has limited distance vision, and has a lot of little quirks, including:

He LOVES pens, and will pounce on them and throw them around.
He likes beer, bran flakes and other weird things (not that I ever feed them to him, but he'd eat them if he could!).
He sneezes and chomps his mouth when you unroll a piece of sellotape.
He always has to know what you're doing - my mum and I were laying turf in the back garden yesterday and he sat the whole time, supervising the operation.
He jumps at nothing and is scared by little things, but is bold and friendly with new people.
He hates it when you put your face up to his, though when he thinks I'm asleep he'll come and sniff my nose.
He can sleep for England and at times I've had to prod him hard to make sure he's still alive.

Leo is my other cat - all black, one-eyed and one-hipped after being hit by a car just before we got him. He's more laid-back than Lester in a lot of ways, but is also more shy of strangers, apart from certain ones where he just goes overboard with love.
He hides behind things, especially if they're black, and jumps out on poor Lester, who NEVER learns to suspect an ambush might be waiting.
He loves boxes and will always get into them. Ditto for sheets and duvet on the bed, paper bags etc. Anything that will cover him over.
He will wander about the house, shouting for no apparent reason.
Unlike Lester, he loves to headbutt, and gets so carried away that sometimes he bites your chin out of pure love (at least, that's what we put it down to)...

I could go on...

Oh, and just to join in the asparagus / tuna conversations, asparagus contains more folic acid than any other vegetable, and is also low in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, but rich in fibre, potassium, thiamine, vitamins A, C, and B6, and glutathione, which is a powerful antioxidant. But... it's also high in oxalic acid so you don't want to feed it too often as it could contribute to oxalate crystals.

Tuna is actually addictive to cats, so once you start feeding it it's damn hard to get them to eat anything else. I use it very very rarely, as a special treat when I'm making a tuna sandwich. Tuna fed to excess can also cause problems such as Steatitis (yellow fat disease) where the body is depleted of Vitamin E. It also contains mercury.

Lbclaire

Sophie, the absolutely most adorable lovely perfect little creature the world has ever known (well, those are her own words), is unfortunately no longer with us (but surely watching us from the other side...) but in her day just *loved* broccoli. You could have a plate with both broccoli and steak on it, and given half the chance she would make off with the broccoli!

My cat Neo just has a funny habit of drinking not by licking from a bowl but sticking his paw in the bowl and then licking the water or milk or whatever from his paw. Very funny to watch .

Oh, and both Neo and Trinity have the not-so-very-fresh preference to drink from the toilet rather than from the bowl of fresh water in the kitchen...

Lizzzzie

I too just found this string. Did not read all the posts yet bc it is such a long long thread. I know cats that would HAVE to play with it. . .

At present I have two cats, Smokey and Mike. They are not very weird, just the normal cat kind of guys who like to bring me dead and leave them under the bed. After finding a few of them badly decomposed I have learned to check under the bed more often. They have a mission to keep Ruby in line and give her etiquette lessons periodically. And they love to play in paper bags and will just dance around in impatient excitement if I get one out and start to fold the top down (it makes for reinforcement) before I place it on the floor. It is de riguer that I must tear a hole in the bottom corner of the bag so that when you are in the bag playing you can stick your paw out and grab the string.

My weird cat story regards my two calico sister cats who were named Susan (Black-eyed Susan) and Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly due to her penchant for chasing the same, also she was the progeny of another Puccini heroine -Tosca). Anyway, these girls learned how to walk through walls. I am not making this up. I thought I had gone completely bonkers the first time it happened. I was living in Bremerton WA (across Puget Sound from Seattle), a very rainy place. I decided I needed to run some errands, and it being a nice day, put the kitty girls outside before I left. I can still picture their disgusted expressions as they sat on the deck watching me as I closed the sliding glass door prior to my departure. Well, as it happened, I decided that I needed to have lunch at Pat's Cookie Jar, and while I was consuming my meal, the weather changed and it began to rain. When I got home, I found my dear little kitties curled up smugly (not a typo) on the hearth in front of the fire place, and I just freaked out. I went all through the house, checking for open doors, windows. I went so far as to go outside the house and look for holes where they might have access to the place. I even went into the crawl space (ugh -- well furnished with spiders and other crawlies) to look for access. My husband was at sea and had been gone for several weeks, so I knew it was not him. I convinced my neighbor that I was stark raving mad by inquiring as to whether he had come next door while I was gone and let them in.

The girls never let on how they did it, but they did this going in and out of the house without benefit of door or cat flap all the time. I postulate a small wormhole that they discovered in the area. They also managed to do this feat here in MO.

The other notable occurance of this was when Susan was pursued by a DOG and tore into the basement of my mother-in-law's house, climbed the shelves in the corner and disappeared from sight, only to show up coming out of the bedroom that was upstairs directly above the shelves.

Maybe cats can do this because no one has convinced them they are solid matter and they instinctively know that because they are made of atoms (which are mostly empty space held together by energy) and so is the rest of the world it is just a question of learning how to line up the empty spaces and transit through what our advanced brains persist in perceiving as solid. All I know is, it was weird and I know that it happened. Has anybody else noticed this?

I vote for Bucky Katt in the comic "Get Fuzzy". His owner (?) thinks he's a cross between a Siamese and a chain saw.

Hi Healingmagichands (any abbrev??)

Haven't read most of this string either (yet), but your story is *fabulous*! Oh those cats, yeah yeah, I guess they grasp the fundamentals of physics much better than we ever will...

Thanks for the entertainment!
Lizzz

My cat has 3 legs so can't scratch behind her ear, her body shakes when she tries to move the missing leg, so I scratch her ear while she shakes!
...bless her though.

Awwwwwww bless

Hi Lizard King. Yes, people seem to be abbreviating me as HMH, and that works for me.

I thought Smokey was the only in the world who drank his water by dipping his paw in it and licking it off. I am so relieved to find out that he is not alone in this method.

Masky will only drink milk out of a cup by the dipping paw method

Milk? Surely not, Reefgirl.

az

Tasha will only drink water out of MY glass. She knows if it is a glass that I have gone and got for her - it has to be mine! She has to have it fresh too - none of this cats don't like freshly drawn tap water nonsense!

We have a new routine at night too - B brings me two glasses of water, one that I pretend to drink from and the other that is really mine and gets covered up quickly!

She's happy!

She is a typical sometimes az, not often

Strewth!
I have just read through 495 sometimes funny sometimes sad, but mostly weird cat stories.
...it makes my cat look pretty normal!

makes me think that STRANGELY STRANGE's cat is a secret agent or a lap dancer

OK, so my cat brushed her fur, tried a bit of lap dancing but promptly fell straight on her face.
...then remembered she only has one back leg!

she can scare dogs away.

we had mother and daughter cat. the mother had 3 legs. one time a dog was chasing her daughter and mother was chasing the dog.

"Our" cat moved in on 10 december last year, newly spayed... She basically knocked on the patio door, checked out the house and went to sleep on the couch...

We're now bringin her on a 4hr drive to a rented summer cottage for 2 weeks, I wonder how that will work... we plan to keep her indoors for the first days, but need to take her on walks on a leash, because she *refuses* to use the litterbox... (tried and tested after surgery of bad abscess on leg) It'll hurt, because she really is an outdoor one!

At first we thought we'd leave her in town, perhaps go back to her old family or find a new one, but I can't bear being without her!

wish us luck!

Oh, and thanks all for this thread! Wonderful stuff!