Shitty kitty

No, not me! You people have the strangest minds.

My poor baby Azrael apparently had a bad case of the runs the other day. I found this out the hard way when I let him and Smurf out of their cage when I got home, then picked him up for a cuddle. It wasn’t until I was out in the garden playing with them and I looked down to see these brown smears all over the front of my white top that I realised where the smell was coming from.

Kittens, like babies, are capable of creating a stench totally disproportionate to their size and Azrael is no exception. This is the cat that will jump up for a cuddle and when you go to put him back on the floor because you’re not going to cuddle him right then (you know, cos you’re eating your dinner, or something else equally trivial) he farts in your airspace. I swear he does this deliberately, and the smell! *bleach*

So there I was, in the garden with cat poop all down my front and a kitty about to go haring off after the geese. So I grabbed him before he knew what was what and upended him to assess the situation.

The situation was, that I was holding a longhaired cat that had obviously suffered a bad case of the runs. I flipped him back over and carried him up the garden, holding him under his forelegs, letting the rest of him dangle, at arms length. I’m sure the neighbours thought I’d lost it. Back into the house I marched and straight into the downstairs bathroom, whereupon I proceeded to perpetrate the ultimate in kitty torture… A bath!

This isn’t the first time this has happened and this time he knew what was coming. He started trying to escape before I even turned the taps on, but a kitten is no match for a closed door that sticks a little, and in no time he was up to his tummy fur in warm water, protesting loudly. This is when I break out the Head and Shoulders since I don’t actually have any kitty shampoo. I suppose I should get some really, but the H&S works so well, and leaves his fur silky soft for days afterwards, he’s even more of a pleasure to snuggle than usual *grin*

Once he’s scrubbed and rinsed comes the trial of getting him out of the bath and wrapped in several layers of towels, a) to dry him off and b) to stop him getting away and running outside to romp in the dirt. Then I carried him upstairs and into the living room and shut him in with me while he recovered from his ordeal.

I didn’t get any pictures of him this time, but there is one photo in my album of a previous bathing incident. The thing with longhaired cats is that they look so big and fluffy normally, that they look like scrawny little aliens when their fur is all wet.

I shouldn’t laugh at him really, he takes it very personally.