I am not much of a cat person. The fact is that in all these years we have had only one house cat. It’s not that I don’t like them; they just don’t mix well with all the dogs. When our son, Glenn was in the 10th grade, a friend of his gave our daughter Christy a kitten. Despite my objections, my wife Bobbie let her keep it. He was black with four white feet and we named him Mittens.
He grew up with dogs and despite being neutered, he was bold and mean. Everything he did was on his terms. He would sit in your lap one minute and the next he would attack you. Some mornings he would claw you out of bed.
Mittens lived to be sixteen years old. As a result he moved with us on three occasions. This made him have to establish his superiority with many neighborhood cats and dogs. On one occasion he was missing for two weeks. I was sure he had been hit by a car or killed by some dominant creature. We looked for him everywhere we could think of and just when we had given up hope, there was a scratch on the door. It was Mittens strolling in like nothing had happened. It was almost like he was wondering where we had been.
Once, while living at Lake Dow, a neighbor had his Jack Russell out in his front yard. The man saw Mittens in our yard and told us that we better put him up, because his dog did not like cats. I guess he thought we were in control. About the time he said it the dog saw the cat. He charged and Mittens ran into the woods. They were out of sight when we heard the dog yelp and he came running and screaming out of the woods with Mittens riding him like a cowboy riding a bull, clawing and biting him all the way home. I apologized to the neighbor and told him that I should have warned him about the cat. From that point on, every time the cat saw a dog he didn’t know, he would attack. His preemptive strikes would leave the dog in shock, wondering what had just happened.
On another occasion some friends visited us from Bristol, Tennessee or Virginia. You know the town where the state line runs down Main Street? They had a couple of Irish Setters with them and as they approached the house the cat came out of the shrubbery and slapped the first dog two or three times and then went after the other one. Neither dog knew what hit them and they looked to us for protection. I have seen him do this to at least ten different dogs over the years and even dogs that you might think could hurt him would back off. Even when he got too old to defend himself, the dogs would give him plenty of space. He spent his retirement years sleeping on a padded chair under the dining room table. I am still not much of a cat person, but I do have a certain fondness for them. Mittens taught us a lot about cats and I do sort of miss him and his preemptive strikes.
