FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Keeping a flying kitten safe

Keeping a flying kitten safe

Manohra adds a betelnut box to her daily slate of breakages

 

I’m on the first floor of my townhouse when a “Crash!” comes from the second floor, a powerful thud-thud-thud down the stairs.
Much too loud to be a turtle heading for freedom, it turns out to be a fake antique wooden betelnut box, now smashed into several hundred pieces.
Toh, who helps me clean my house, looks down from the second floor. Her face is white. “Please believe me!” she says. “I didn’t do it.”
I know she didn’t, and I know who did. As I looked up the stairs, I saw the guilty party’s face, and - really - that face had guilt written all over it.
Manohra, the flying kitten, lives and reacts in the moment, and now, as she looks at me, her worried, wide eyes tell me that she accidentally pushed the box off its table, sending it on its trip down the stairs.
Toh understands as soon as she sees Manohra and her guilty face, but Toh is in my house for only a few hours once a week. She doesn’t know the full extent of the mayhem Manohra causes almost every day.
The problem is that Manohra, now almost seven months old, is learning to watch the other cats and follow what they do.
When one of her mentors, my white lady Mekhala, wishes to get outside to the patio, she first tries to peel back the screen from the door. It’s quite difficult, and after hours of work, she figures out that it’s much easier to call me and order me to open the door.
Manohra, however, isn’t allowed to go outside. Thep and Thong, the two soi cats, have taught her how to climb the fence and get to the soi. Following in Mekhala’s paw steps, she’s started scratching at that opening in the screen, slowly making it larger and larger by the day.
My house could be 10 times its size, full of rooms all open to fun-loving Manohra, but she will never be happy until she has the full freedom of the soi. Besides, she wants to be with the soi boys.
I know that eventually, she’ll escape, and then what will happen to her, a cat who trusts everyone, even dogs and other cats, and who doesn’t have the street smarts to avoid moving cars?
How do you keep an animal safe and alive and happy?
Luckily, Toh, who has learned special skills from the 30 dogs her full-time employer keeps, knows how to repair the hole in the screen.
Manohra is safe for now – frustrated but safe nevertheless.
 
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