TigerHawk

TigerHawk (ti*ger*hawk): n. 1. The title of this blog and the nom de plume of its founding blogger; 2. A deep bow to the Princeton Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes; 3. The nickname for Iowa's Hawkeye logo. Posts include thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations. The opinions we express are our own, and not those of each other, our employers, our relatives, our dead ancestors, or unrelated people of similar ethnicity.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

A new angle on cat blogging

By Charlottesvillain at 2/21/2006 10:28:00 AM

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.