Comfort
My cat has been over-grooming herself again. She has two favoured spots for this activity: a patch on the upper inside of her right front leg, and a patch on the outside of her back right leg. She nibbles and licks these patches with her sharp teeth and barbed tongue until they are bald, raw, and pink. The first time we noticed her doing this, it was quite advanced; we took her to the vet, who told us her little self-created wounds were already infected. She received a shot of antibiotics and was sentenced to a week in the cone. We also took home a plug-in diffuser of cat pheromones, which the vet, owner of three cats, told us she used to stop her own pets from displaying cat stress behaviours: over-grooming, urine marking, trying to kill each other.
Despite our best attempts to stop her from self-injuring in this way, she continues to intermittently over-groom. This morning, after releasing her from another week in the cone on Sunday, I saw she’s gone straight back to it, and both patches appear bald and pink. I almost cried when I noticed this. She hates being put in the cone, and I hate putting it on her. She recognises the cone when I pick it up, and goes into scared army-crawl mode; she gets down low and runs away from me as though she’s under a mesh of barbed wire, trying to dodge a hail of live bullets.
Usually, Flopsy is aloof in the way that a lot of cats are, especially females. She likes pats, scratches and cuddles, but they must be on her terms. She follows my partner and I from room to room, but always with plausible deniability, as though it’s a total coincidence that she wants to be right next to us. She will sit next to Rupert in his home office all day, often so close that she interferes with his ability to use the computer, but face away from him. There is none of the pack instinct you get with a dog. She does not need to receive consistent recognition as part of our household. It’s her household, and should she find herself cuddled up on our laps every single night of her life, well, how nice that must be for us!
Being in the cone strips her of the elective pretense of her social life with us. Because she can’t groom herself properly, she is in constant need of comfort in the form of physical touch. Self-soothing through licking and chewing her body is a cornerstone of stability in her little cat psyche, and when it can’t be done autonomously, she needs us to do it for her. Her personality changes as soon as she’s contained in this little foam collar shaped like a flower. She becomes much more vocal and solicitous, staring at us with big round eyes full of pleading. Scratch me, please! Stroke me! Rub my ears! Poke the sleep out of the corners of my eyes! Please, Ol Gil really needs this.
I find this change in her both extremely cute and very sad. She is never more adorable than when she is in this state. She will run to me, do a series of tiny mews, and launch herself into my hand by standing up on her back legs. When she’s being patted in the cone, her eyes close and her mouth opens slightly, and you can almost see the dopamine being released in her brain. Her breathing slows, she purrs, and for a moment the need for comfort is gone. If I stop patting her before she’s satisfied, she will start licking the inside of her cone, which makes a pathetic little scratching sound that stabs directly at my heart.
Why does this form of dependence depress me so much? Flopsy is our pet — we feed her, toilet her, take care of her health, think of her needs with the kind of focused attention that makes up love.
I guess an important thing to know about my relationship with Flopsy is that I didn’t make any effort to obtain her as a companion. About eight years ago, when I was living in a share house in Croydon, she simply showed up and refused to leave. She was about six months old, still a kitten, not in the cute and helpless neonatal way, but in the skinny-tail, rangy, big-eyes adolescent way. She would sit outside our back door and meow for hours on end until someone came and interacted with her. I’m not sure what made her choose our house from all the other family bungalows on the street. I suspect it might have been my own emotional neediness at that point in my life: I desperately needed a friend, needed comfort, and then there she was. I started playing with her, then feeding her, then letting her into the house, against some objections from my housemates. Eventually we got her desexed, microchipped and registered her with the council. Her legal name, which I still find hilarious every time I read it on her state-issued paperwork, is Flopsy Robertson.
In a very real way, she chose me. Our relationship started at her behest. Over the years since, she’s spent long alternating stretches living either with me or my former housemate and now very close friend Zoe, who is her second guardian. Zoe was even less keen on a pet than I was in the beginning — she’s not really a “pet guy”, and being a vegan, the process of feeding Flopsy spoonfuls of ground-up pelagic fish slop was not appealing. But eventually she won Zoe over, and now, like any non-custodial parent, Zoe likes to receive updates and pictures of her. I know that if there’s ever any reason we can’t have Flopsy live with us, she will have a home just as loving with Zoe and Pat as she does with Rupert and me.
Putting her in the cone seems like a breach of the agreement we made, and even more upsettingly, like a failure of caregiving on my part. Why is she stressed enough in the first place that she ends up over-grooming herself? I don’t know. I am careful to observe her habits and moods, but I’m not sure what precipitates these episodes. We got a new couch recently, that might have something to do with it. Cats tend not to like change. But every morning I leave my bedroom and find her curled up on the new couch like she owns it, having slept there seemingly all night. I can’t ask her what’s wrong, and my deductive powers are not strong enough to puzzle out what could be upsetting her.
I actually do ask her what’s wrong sometimes, in the low, singsong baby voice I use when I’m cuddling or patting her. But there are things she can’t tell me, even though we know each other so well. All I can do is make a decision on her behalf, and hope it’s the right one. So I pick up the cone, grab the cat treats, and try to get enough of her cooperation to put it back on without too much drama. Instantly she pleads to be scratched nonstop, and I do this for her for another week. I do not find this comforting, even though she does.