Here We Go Again

Christmas Day for cats is always a wrapping extravaganza!

https://youtu.be/09kOp2MAn2Q

Neko is one of the sweetest cats we've ever owned. And also one of the dumbest. His intelligence level is particularly well demonstrated by the moment when he turns around to attack the tissue paper moving behind him. It's moving because your tail is moving it, idiot!

Thirty seconds before I took this, Yami was chasing a piece of her own fur around in the bathtub, slithering and rolling about on the slippy floor and sides. My hope of catching this on video was stymied when inevitably she stopped as soon as she spotted the camera. So instead you get a photo of curious Yami wondering what the hell the weird buzzing black box with the lights is.

I had some trepidations this year about putting up the Christmas tree - I remember very well the first year we had Kuro and Boog and they completely destroyed the thing. No sooner had I started to put it up than they were climbing everywhere inside it!



So this year I had some concerns about the actions of the one year old Voids, and their potential for destruction. As I set up and decorated the tree, Kuro was there to supervise every stage, as he does every year, and he was joined by Neko, who found all the rustling slightly disturbing - he would scurry off, then come creeping back to watch some more. Yami demonstrated complete disinterest in the whole process, glanced briefly at the commotion, then returned to her spot by the heating vent to warm her belly.



And guess what? When the tree was fully installed with shiny dangling things, it was 14 year old Kuro who proved to be the problem child. He's never lost his fascination with the tree, and while he no longer climbs all the way up it, he does sit beneath, with his little black and white feet poking up into the decor and knocking off the baubles. Or on the arm of the sofa, doing the same. It's very difficult to photograph him in the act, I can only catch him contemplating...



And the Voids have been entirely innocent!

Well, largely innocent. Kuro's obsession has proven slightly infectious, and Neko has been spending more time rustling around underneath it this past week. Grandpa Kuro is teaching him his horrible habits...

Neko found a large banana slug on his walk today. So of course he tried to eat it. He’s not as bright as his sister.



Will he learn anything from this incident? Highly doubtful.

When we first brought the voids home, they were really quite hard to tell apart. There are subtle differences in the presence of some white hairs here and there on Neko, and Yami has softer fur, but nothing was useful to distinguish them from six feet away. We put different coloured collars on them to solve the problem. Then we took Neko's collar off after a few weeks, because he was losing hair around his neck.

Two and a half months later, Neko Void has outgrown his sister. He has longer legs and a longer spine, and has generally turned into a sleek, muscular mini-panther. Poor Yami-chan loses all of their wrestling matches now! Neko has also proven to be very well named, because he's a complete glutton who will stretch his neck into anyone else's food the second he's finished his own. Neko-necks has become his new nickname.

Neko 'Look, I'm a Panther!' on top of the cat tree. Yes, we deliberately put the cat toys up there so they have to go up and knock them down again.



Yesterday the SO decided that Yami doesn't need to wear a collar any more and she'd probably prefer to be without it, so he took it off. This morning, I was telling him that Neko had been very quiet all morning, sleeping in one of the cat trees and hadn't moved in hours. 'Well, until now,' he said, clutching a void cat in his arms. So I had to tell him that the void he was holding was Yami, not Neko. 'No,' he said, and began turning the void around, looking for the bits with white hairs, at which point the void let out a long wail of protest and demanded to be set down. The SO conceded I was right then, because while men may not be very observant, the behavioural differences between the two are harder to miss, and Yami will NOT put up with any protracted form of manhandling.

In other news, I've been trying for over a month to get photos or video of Kuro playing with a void cat (usually Neko), but the instant I grab a camera, they stop what they're doing and just stare at me. They do get on, I swear, I just can't prove it!

Now that we've had a fully integrated cat household with everyone loose together for several weeks, the patterns of the voids are becoming clearer.

Yami was initially very cuddly, but she's grown more aloof and is taking our presence somewhat for granted. She's still sociable, but very much on her terms - she's chatty and loves to be stroked, not so much with the picking up and sitting on laps. Neko is much more persuadable on those fronts.

Both the voids initially tried very hard to be friends with Kuro, but Kuro just seems to prefer Neko, and cuts him a lot more slack. Kuro and Yami sometimes have positive interactions and play together, but at other times they do bat paws at one another and express a desire to be left alone. Neko very occasionally gets a Kuro paw waved at him when he bugs Sleeping Kuro, but Yami would get batted around the ears for many of the things Neko gets away with.

This includes sleeping arrangements. When we got the voids, I expected that as siblings who had always lived together, they would probably curl up and sleep together, but they never do. Instead, Neko has decided he wants to curl up and sleep with Kuro, which Kuro is at best ambivalent about. Neko has the whole bed to choose from, but he always lies down right next to Kuro, and if Kuro moves a bit further away, Neko just wriggles closer again.

Boog used to want to sleep right next to Kuro too, and one of the strategies Kuro developed to counter this was what we called Aggressive Washing. If Boog came and flopped alongside Kuro on the bed, Kuro would wash Boog's head very firmly and pointedly, until Boog got fed up with it and moved away. Unfortunately, when Kuro attempts this strategy with Neko, it backfires spectacularly, because Neko LOVES being washed firmly and just starts purring. At some point, Kuro usually gives up and uses Neko as a pillow instead.

Yami, in her private little way, has no desire to sleep on the bed with the humans and other cats. Instead, she spends the night under the bed, but she does like to let us all know she's there and squeaks and trills happily as she settles into her nest below.

Yami void and Neko void aligning themselves with the heating vents. Kuro-kun is of a much hairier and hardier persuasion.



Although the lure of an empty box cannot long be denied.



In other news, the voids had their first Mouse Experience the other night. I thought it was a bit odd that Neko hadn't come to bed, and when Kuro got up to investigate too, I knew something was afoot. They were both obsessing over a pot plant, which in Neko's case might mean he'd lost a tin foil ball behind it, but Kuro-kun is a tad more discerning. Sure enough, when I shone a light behind the pot, a mouse fled out and hurtled itself down the stairs, hotly pursued, and vanished into the laundry room.

Kuro gave up a while later and came back to bed, but the voids never did, and when I got up in the morning, they were very squeaky and excited and wanted me to know that the last place the mouse had been seen was behind the bookshelves in the pool room. Yami was being a very determined ambush predator and wouldn't even come for breakfast - apparently the potential for a breakfast she could murder was far superior to a mere bowl of cat food - and I ended up feeding her where she was, so she could continue to monitor the bookshelves. She's a very stubborn and determined animal!

There is now a humane mouse trap tucked between the bookshelves and the wall.

The integration of Kuro-kun and the Void-lets is going well. Kuro washed one of them on the head today while they were both sitting in the sun. And just now Kuro and Neko were sitting glued basically nose to nose as they wished to inform us that the humane mouse trap in the kitchen drawer had in fact caught a mouse. Well spotted, cats!

There is one primary bone of contention remaining, and that is Kuro-kun's tail. Mr Kuro is a long-haired cat, in possession of a super-floofy tail which sometimes proves irresistible to voids. Neko in particular has a bad habit of playing with the world's most perfect tail, which occasionally gets him hissed at. Other than that deeply personal imposition, Kuro-kun is very tolerant of the interlopers, and he doesn't even mind when they stick their heads in his food bowl.



A sleepy void.



Mice have not been the only uninvited mammals in our house in the past 24 hours. Last night, Kuro-kun rather excitedly notified us at 5am that there was a bat flying around our bedroom - one of the perils of living in the woods and having a chimney. It's only the second time it's happened in thirteen years, but still....

So we evicted Kuro, closed the doors into the bathroom and the hallway, and opened the door onto the balcony in the hope our visitor might leave voluntarily. You would think a bat in an illuminated bedroom would take the exit into the night, but apparently not. Round and around it flew, up near the ceiling. So we turned off the light, thinking that might be confusing it.

That just made the bat land. Up on the wall in the highest point of the roof. At first we tried throwing socks at it, but even though we damn near hit it, it stayed put. Which is where the broomstick came in.

Even being gently poked at by a broomstick, the bat was very reluctant to let go of the wall. Nor would it grab hold of the broomstick instead. After several minutes of being prodded, it did eventually take flight again, and I waved a towel over my head to try and steer it towards the open door. Round and round it flew again, showing no signs of leaving, until eventually it flew into the towel I was waving, and I was able to wrap it up carefully while it chittered very angrily, and then I took it out onto the balcony and released it.

By that time, I was wide awake with cold feet, and I never did go back to sleep before I had to get up for work...

Neither of us can consistently tell the voids apart, even two weeks later. Every time we think we've got it nailed, they prove us wrong again. Kuro's probably much better at it than us stupid humans are!

Also, it was ridiculously hard for us to watch TV this evening, when there was a void-let on the other sofa continuously throwing himself head-over-heels chasing his own tail. I don't think there's much brain in that one....

They've settled in nicely :-)

They both love to purr. The male cat pushes his head into our hands when we're stroking him - Boog used to do that.

Kuro has sniffed at them through a cracked open door without any obvious agitation from anyone. Hopefully we can get them integrated without too much fuss.