Cat Chat Feline Forum

Well, actually, banneds; we have a large population of them.

Every time I find one round a package or a bundle of mail I stick it in a certain chest of drawers, in case it comes in handy and to keep it away from Molly, who is obsessed with these things. She quite likes playing with my hair scrunchies sometimes, and those towelling bands. Those skinny rubber bands you get in a multicoloured pack from the stationer's don't seem to interest her. No, it has to be the thick brown genuine Royal Mail article that arrives through the letterbox. I'm surprised she's never unpacked the mail before I have.

She can smell them. Rubber bands to her are catnip, butterflies, mice, moths, spiders, whatever gladdens the heart of an active cat. Should she manage to filch one, all is peace, with a blissful cat skipping in circles round her treasure, picking it up, carrying it a few steps, putting it down and gloating over it, dancing round it, going into total ecstasy over it ...

Alas, the rubber band must be banned ...

She might chew it or swallow it, or swallow bits. She might manage to catch it round some part of her person while my back's turned. I daren't let her play freely with one, no matter how she adores them.

I feel so sorry and cruel when she stuffs her nose up against a drawer left open a crack, to inhale the intoxicating aroma of her prey, or finds an inch or so's gap when she shoves in a paw right up to her armpit and rummages ... how can I deprive her?

I have to. Sorry, Molly

could you perhaps make a rubber band ball, big enough for her to be unable to swallow it, or even splash out on buying her one?

http://www.wilko.com/paper-clips-rubber ... lsrc=aw.ds

or even better http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fake-Joke-Rub ... xHmUv4u6Og

Years ago I lived on a path by the river in Oxford - a lovely safe place for my kitten Toby to roam while I was gardening. I couldn't understand why I always seemed to have so many of those thick rubber bands in my garden, until I realised he found all the ones the postman discarded and brought them home. He never chewed them, just carried them back, played with them for a while, then dropped them on the grass and forgot about them.

Wow, Kay, that rubber band ball is a work of art! I've seen far worse in the Tate ... in fact much MUCH worse in the Tate (but I'm a philistine.) I don't like to think of Molly hugging it and kicking hell out of it though ... with her ingenuity, she'd dismantle it. Also I think the single rubber band appeals to her as prey, that sort of limp wriggliness, like a caterpillar or small mouse.

I wish she could be like your Toby, Fjm, play for a while and then forget it, perhaps I'm fussing too much (as I do.)

One of these days if I can sit and watch her every move perhaps I'll see if she gets tired of the band ... the band ... the rubber band ... (what was that Sherlock Holmes story ... the Speckled Band, and the poor snake got a rough deal )

Trouble is, she never gets tired of anything ...

I've seen Ria start playing with a rubber band if I've left one lying around, and I take it away immediately. I'm not sure what it would do to her innards if she swallowed it, and I don't want to find out! But at least she doesn't seem to be attracted to the smell. I have a box of bands on a low shelf of my desk, and she never shows any interest in that.

Considering how hard it can be to get them to eat cat food, it's amazing what things they'd rather chew. I remember one panicky moment, entirely my own fault. I had a curtain whose hem was coming undone. I sewed it up in situ, stuck the needle through the curtain while I trimmed off loose threads, and forgot to retrieve the needle. Later I saw the cat I had at the time start chewing at the remaining thread dangling from the needle. If he'd swallowed the thread, the needle would have followed it down. Fortunately I saw what was happening in time to take the needle away.

We have to be so careful with the little terrors!

Lilith wrote:(what was that Sherlock Holmes story ... the Speckled Band, and the poor snake got a rough deal )

Yes, there wouldn't be much sympathy for a poisonous snake in that era. I don't know enough about snakes to know if Conan Doyle was right that a "swamp adder" was the "deadliest snake in India." CD's natural history wasn't great when he said that the villain collected Indian animals, hence he had a baboon and a cheetah. Cheetahs don't come from India. The landmark Holmes dramatisations with Jeremy Brett made the cat a leopard rather than a cheetah.

Mary - it wasn't just in the fauna of India that Conan Doyle could be a bit inaccurate - there is one story where he forgets that over a period of 200 years, trees tend to grow!

Yes, "The Musgrave Ritual." I noticed that too! If you're going to write stories about a super-smart detective, you need an editor to check your facts more carefully!

LoI the swamp adder is African! As this guy -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtkM70AX2Ks

is fond of saying, 'the most venomous snake is the one that just bit you' ... Here he is having a chat with his king cobras (bit of a showman.)

CD's poor snake was kept in, I believe, a safe without an infra-red lamp or a nice defrosted mouse or two in sight ... no wonder it bit people ...

Thanks, Lilith. I'm not very impressed with the show-off snake keeper in the film, but I appreciate the info. The other thing about the snake in the Sherlock story is that it was fed with a saucer of milk. ?? I don't know if a snake would drink that or not, but it's hardly a natural food for a reptile!

Lol Mary I didn't know myself till I googled it. I always thought Conan Doyle had got his wires crossed anyway - and as for the saucer of milk ...

In India a snake, especially a cobra, was often a sort of nature deity and if one was living somewhere, say in the roots of a tree, it was polite to offer the sort of thing you'd honour a deity with, marigolds, sweets, milk ... well, snakes have no use for marigolds or sweets and they can't digest milk, but the milk would encourage rodents and a snake can certainly digest a rodent, so it stayed around as local pest control operative ... hence the custom of offering a snake milk, so far as I can make out. But Victorians like Conan Doyle got it into their heads that in India, snakes drank milk

In any case if you kept a snake in a chilly safe it would be far too torpid to bite anyone, but a little detail like that wouldn't have stopped CD and his intrepid hero ... there's no police like Holmes ...

I wish you had all been there to point all this out when I was traumatised by a radio broadcast of The Speckled Band as a child! It was far too scary to stay and listen to the end, and then even worse not to know what happened, so we had to ask... I lay awake watching to make sure a snake didn't come down the radiator pipe by my bed for months!

Aww! You poor little devil! It isn't funny, is it?

Well, not until a good few years later ... I remember reading 'Jane Eyre' at 7 ... I was a precocious child, and I paid for it.

Why Bertha Rochester should have decided to leave her cosy attic suite for our airing cupboard I don't know, but she did, I KNOW she did, and even in broad daylight I would crouch on the loo, terrified, knicker waistband clutched in readiness for a quick getaway in case the cupboard door opened and Missis came out to get me ...

YES! As for the dark hints about acid baths in a book I read at the age of 9, I leave you to imagine how gingerly I would dip in the first toe for years afterwards...

Well, I think you should have stuck with good wholesome books like Swallows and Amazons!

alanc wrote:Well, I think you should have stuck with good wholesome books like Swallows and Amazons!

With a dad who thinks his children would be "Better drowned than duffers."!

Lol

I did TRY to read children's fiction, got terribly confused with Alice in Wonderland and once attempted to read a Swallows and Amazons but was puzzled by their names ... one was called ... Titty???

Able Seaman Titty, no less

(There did used to be a band in Wakefield called the Flying Seamen - but that's another story ...errm sorry mods)

But ANYTHING'S better than the dreaded Enid Blyton ...

Why have elephants got big ears?
Because Noddy won't pay the ransom!

I read a single Enid Blyton book - a Secret Seven one in which a dog had its throat cut in the early chapters - and avoided them ever after! Children's books could be pretty shocking in the 50s.

Urrgh that woman was a monster!

Children often don't learn compassion early enough; indifference to animals in children's (or any) literature can be dangerous

Apparently EB did have 2 daughters; I gather these were produced, in party frocks, for publicity purposes, but didn't actually have much of a life with their famous mother.

I remember being bought a book of EB short stories, all along the lines of 'Bessie's mother told her never to sweep the dust under the mat when she cleaned her room. But Bessie was disobedient and did sweep the dust under the mat, so the King of the Elves came with all his fairies and took Bessie away to Elfland where she was severely punished ...'

Imagine filling a child's head with drivel like that!

Hi, a bit self-indulgent of me to resurrect this thread but just remembered this -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AvMrpPofFY

Mike Harding's 'January Man' - kind of appropriate; brilliant guy and brilliant song, awful picture quality, but you can't have everything,hope you like

Lilith wrote:Lol Why have elephants got big ears?
Because Noddy won't pay the ransom!

My dear old dad never did get that joke.

I love Mike Harding. 'It's hard being a cowboy in Rochdale' and 'When the Martians land in Huddersfield', SO funny!

He's just so great! Daft, wacky, not always in the best of taste but omg never anyone else like him ...

I found this as well and sat up watching it, haven't seen it all yet. I've been vaguely depressed lately, nothing crucial but you know how it is, just a bit down ... last night I was limp and tearful with laughter ... I really detest the kind of person who says 'cheer up and snap out of it' but I have heard that laughter is a 'psychic antiseptic' ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZfj-3d0bws

I too remember the nit nurse, oh and the Aussie slang for a wee - 'Jist goin' to syphon me python', and the modern town planning architect who was savaged to death by his guide dog ...

Mike, you're a gem