Tuesday, February 21, 2006
A new angle on cat blogging
Via Drudge is this story on a 33 pound "monster cat" in China. Not to brag, but I've seen bigger.
A lot bigger.
In the summer of 1983 I worked for a large boarding kennel in Princeton, New Jersey. I met many wonderful and interesting animals there who I remember quite well, including a spectacular and brilliant standard poodle named Sergio, and a friendly chow named Poncho, both of whom I got to know quite well as they each spent hours with me at the grooming table. (Undercoating a chow is 9 hour commitment). There was even a dog with my name who died on my last day of work before I went off to my freshman year of college. I found that strange.
One day I was asked to give a cat a bath. I went up to the cat room and peered into the enclosure, and saw the largest cat I had ever seen, by a wide wide margin. It was enormous, mostly black, and fortunately docile compared with the hissing, spitting animals I sometimes had to fetch from the cat room. It would have been a very big cat even in normal proportion, but it was obese. It looked like a short furry snake that had just eaten a pig.
I loaded it into an airline crate and brought it down to the grooming room, where I put it in a harness and lifted into the counter high bath tub where we did our dog baths. I had lifted a lot of animals that summer and was used to the light springy feel of a cat. This cat actually was lighter to lift than it looked, but it was still a load.
"How much does this cat weigh?" I asked. My boss, a German of characteristic precision, told me it had been weighed and was 40 pounds. "Don't let it fool you," he warned. "It is quicker than it looks, and will make a break for it if you give it a chance." I didn't, and the cat was bathed without incident.
I can't recall the name of that cat, but I will never ever forget it.
1 Comments:
By 
Cardinalpark, at
Wed Feb 22, 06:41:00 PM:
Dude that is a uniquely fat cat. Makes Garfield look svelte...
