There are times when I feel like a bad pet owner; when I can’t really be bothered with an attention-seeking cat or when I leave him home alone over-night. I can’t even begin to imagine the levels of guilt I’d be engendering if I had a child, considering how guilty even a cat can make me feel!
Still, he is fed every day and has clean water in his bowl, so that’s a good starting point, right? And we go out into the garden together every day – and some days we go a bit further…
That’s my house in the middle of the picture… This morning I took the cat out for a walk down by the bog/lake behind the garden; he doesn’t like crossing the open field from the back of the garden down to the bushes by the lake, but once we’re down there he absolutely loves it!
There are things to sniff, trees to climb, water to almost fall into and basically everything a little cat could wish for!
This is when I feel that I might be an okay cat owner; he doesn’t get perfection all the time, but there are times when I definitely deliver quality of life to my little Loke. And today has been a good day for him, I think; a morning walk down by the lake, and now he’s sitting on my shoulder, insisting that I should stop paying attention to the laptop and start paying attention to HIM!
Okay, I give up… I have to go pet a cat now… Here’s one final picture from this morning’s walk:
He doesn’t look like a neglected cat to me. If sitting on your shoulder hadn’t gotten your attention away from the laptop, his next move would have been to drape himself artfully across the keyboard. I once had a pair of Siamese cats who figured out how to turn out my desk light when they thought I had been paying too much attention to my school work and not enough to them.
For Loke the keyboard seems to be mainly something to walk across on his way to me. And if anything he’ll choose to sit between me and the keyboard…
And of course he’s not neglected; I suspect he’s rather spoiled in many ways, especially since most of the time it’s just me and him in the house. I don’t like it when people refer to their pets as their “children”, but he’s certainly part of our little two-unit pack. (And I’ve folded on almost every principle since I got him, except for the “no animals in the bedroom” rule – he’s never been in that room, so there’s a good chance I’ll actually stick to that!)