It started a few days ago, when our normally sedate cat started darting from one end of the living room to the other for no apparent reason. Then she would meow plaintively, as if she needed food or wanted to go outside, but if you followed her to where she seemed to want to go, she would just stop at some arbitrary location and look up at you quizzically, as if to say, "Where to, chief?""What is up with Molly?" I would say to Mrs. Diesel. "She's acting like she's on crack." We've had this stupid cat for 11 years now, and she had never acted like this. We weren't exactly worried, but it is a little disconcerting to see an animal experiencing a sudden personality shift. Although maybe that's just because in the movies, animals acting strangely is always a harbinger of something horrible. "Shut up, Duke!" yells Expendable Character #1, just before he gets eviscerated by whatever dreadful corpse-like entity Duke was trying to warn him about.
I have to admit that part of the reason I never talked to my cat about drugs is that I feared being thought of as a hypocrite. You see, everybody in my family except my daughter, Speed Pony, is on drugs. (Speed Pony doesn't need drugs because, well, she's freaking Speed Pony.) I take blood pressure medication so that I won't die of a heart attack and Prozac so that I won't die of a shotgun blast to the head (Take it easy, I'm joking*). Mrs. Diesel has rheumatoid arthritis, so she takes all kinds of drugs for that. And my son, Climber, takes Adderall(R), which is basically a stimulant, because he's a space cadet. I think that's the actual technical medical term: Space cadetism. He can't focus on a task for more than about 2.3 seconds without some kind of medication.**
So I feel a bit hypocritical lecturing my cats on drugs. And who knows, maybe it's really hard to be a cat. Maybe sometimes you just need something to get through the 3 hours of the day that you're awake. But when a cat's behavior starts affecting other people, that's when I have to put my foot down.
As I mentioned, Climber takes Adderall every morning. We usually leave his pill out for him on the kitchen counter so that he'll remember to take it. We have no way of knowing whether he has actually taken it; we just assume that if the pill is gone, he's taken it. I mean, we could ask him if he took it, but there's not much point in that sort of questioning due to the aforementioned space cadetism. So as far as we're concerned, no pill on counter = Climber has taken his pill.Around the same time that Molly started freaking out, Climber started bringing more homework home. It seems that he was having trouble getting all of his work done at school. Still, we didn't correlate these two behavioral shifts until yesterday morning, when I caught Molly on the counter batting Climber's pill to the floor.
Once she had knocked it to the floor, she leaped down and proceeded to attempt to eat it.
I smacked her and grabbed the pill, which was now wet with cat saliva. "What the hell, Molly?" I yelled, and proceeded to rinse the pill under the faucet. (Those damn things are expensive; no need to waste one on account of a few cat cooties.) I put the pill back on the counter.
Molly immediately leaped back onto the counter and grabbed the pill with her paw. You've probably never seen a cat grab something before, but I swear that she grabbed it. The pill was still damp, so it stuck to her paw. She then lifted the paw to her mouth and tried to pop it in her mouth, like it was a Junior Mint or something.
"Molly!" I yelled again, snatching the pill from her paw. I pushed her to the floor.
By this point the capsule had pretty well deteriorated, so I pulled it open and dumped the contents into Climber's oatmeal. "Try to get that, you stupid cat!"
Now as I mentioned, Adderall is a stimulant. It's a Schedule II controlled substance, meaning that it has high potential for abuse and addiction. And of course the dosage of Climber's pill is meant for a fifty pound child, not a ten pound cat. I'm not sure what the proper dose for a cat would be. I think it would depend on how bored you were.We have no way of knowing for sure whether Molly got into the Adderall before. All I know is that cat was acting like a freaking drug addict. I can't explain its eagerness to get Climber's pill unless she knew exactly what it was.
In any case, we're now keeping better control of our controlled substances, and Molly seems to be back to normal. I think she's coming to grips with the fact that she has a problem. Admitting you have a problem is, of course, the first step to recovery.
And I'm pretty sure that for a cat, the next eleven steps are sleeping.
*I'm really not joking.
**Please don't lecture me on the dangers of medicating my child unless you're also going to deal with the risk factors associated with not being able to finish 3rd grade.
All the cats at humor-blogs.com are on drugs.]]>