Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [84]
Contrary advice claims that eating grass is bad for them and fills them with parasites and we should prevent it, an athletic job if we have several outdoors cats; we’ll need to hire assistants. Nutritious or not, they can’t stop themselves.
I’ve been told that when cats eat grass it’s a sign of rain. Perhaps that’s it. They eat grass to tell us it’s going to rain, and come to throw it up at our feet to make sure we noticed and will take our umbrellas.
Cats eat grass. There are always some mysteries left.
Whether or not they’re eating grass, they do get uninvited guests from time to time. Roundworms are the commonest. They can arrive in kittens via their mother, or be passed on in the litter pan or just from the great outdoors. They produce flatulence, diarrhea, potbelly, retching, and vomiting; the worms themselves appear in the vomit, curled up into little spirals; hence, roundworms. Tapeworms are most commonly transmitted by fleabites, and advertise their presence with little white rice grains around the cat’s anus. As usual, we’re discouraged from using supermarket medicines for them without consulting our vet.
Ear mites pass easily from cat to cat, and strays come fully equipped with them even more often than with incipient kittens. They itch. I’ve seen a cat kick its ears to bloody shreds from a particularly bad mess of them; with a lighter infestation the host just sits around with its ears at half-mast and an inward expression on its face, scratching moodily from time to time. Mites prefer the short and furry ear to the naked, drafty caverns of the Siamese, and are said to be at their happiest in the lop-eared Scottish Fold. You can get drops for them from your vet, but it’s best to let him do the initial scrape-out, since most of us are too timid, and rightly so, to be sufficiently savage and thorough.
Fleas are among the most successful inhabitants of the earth. If, as we’re told, there will still be cockroaches around after the nuclear holocaust, the cockroaches will probably have fleas.
One cat book says, reproachfully, that the well-cared-for cat seldom “catches fleas,” but I don’t see why a bright flea wouldn’t actually prefer a tender, plushy cared-for cat to a slat-sided, thin-coated stray. Surely the attention of fleas is a compliment?
Some cats have an allergic reaction to their bite and some seem hardly to notice them, but all can get tapeworm from them. And in a suitably welcoming environment, a happily married pair of fleas can give us six thousand youngsters within a month.
Some years seem to favor them. One summer, in the country, the whole county had fleas. Even people with no resident livestock had them, and people with cats and dogs beggared themselves with collars and sprays and bombs, and still they came. Only Rachel and her two cats had no fleas. Rachel put brewers’ yeast in their food. There wasn’t a flea in the place; it was a refuge for the flea-bitten neighbors, and as we sat there scratching our ankles and brooding we noticed there were no screens in the windows and no flies in the house. Rachel planted tansy under the windows to keep out flies.
I don’t know about the tansy, but scientific tests prove that brewers’ yeast has very little effect on fleas. My private feeling is that it had something to do with the faith and personal goodness of Rachel herself, and if I relied on yeast and tansy the cats and I would be bare, bleached bones by morning.
Garlic doesn’t help either, they say.
Once you’ve got fleas, there’s no use just tackling the cat’s, you’ve got to do the house, or have it done professionally, with the cats safely elsewhere. Put some mothballs or a flea collar in the vacuum-cleaner bag and vacuum daily for a while, to catch the eggs before they hatch. For the cat, there are collars and tags, squirts and roll-ons, powders, shampoos, a whole arsenal. A cat with battalions of fleas or a severe allergy to them should have a medicated shampoo; it takes the flea allergens away as well as the fleas, and leaves a repellent residue.
We all have better sense than to