My cat Boojum used to have a penchant for eating rubber bands. I couldn’t leave them out or they’d get eaten. He’d even find them on top of a dresser or other tall furniture. I think he could smell them.
Anyway, usually he’d pass them halfway, and then inevitably retire to some item-of-great-value upon which he’d lie to clean himself and extract the half-excreted, half-digested latex elastic, which would then create a sticky, gooey, ungodly mess on whatever he left it, and usually accompanied by a volume of liquishit. The worst was a brand new $300 down-filled ski jacket… briefly bright yellow… which instantly became a yellow and brown thrift store donation.
So one Christmas we were celebrating at my parents’ house, when my mom thought it would be cute to give him a ball of yarn. Well, I didn’t know that this was an elastic yarn, with a spandex core surrounded by wool yarn. I guess spandex has latex in it. Anyway, Boojum decides to eat the entire thing… it must have been 30" of yarn. I didn’t see him, just noticed that the yarn was gone… I figured that Mom must have picked it up, or it got lost under the couch, or whatever.
A week later, I see him leaving the litterbox and tending to this thing hanging out of his sphincter… it was hanging out about 4" and my first reaction was an instictive “AHHH! Parasite!” About 1250 milliseconds later, I realized it must be another elastic band… God knows where he found it. So before he can ruin another expensive item, I get a wad of TP and use it to grab the dangly shitrope and give a little tug…
rrrrRROWRR!! The cat shoots across the house like a wire-guided missile with a zzzzzip of 30" of elastic yarn extruding from his ass. I’m left holding nearly three feet of this brown thing, stunned by the unexpected length of it. It takes a few moments of close inspection to finally identify. The Christmas String. The Yule Yarn. And all the way across the room, where it lubricated the yarn on the way out, dollops of semiliquid cat feces.
Boojum is nowhere to be seen, and as I start cleaning the mess up, a process that made me over an hour late for work, I realize, “Oh, crap – that cat could be in serious trouble!” So I go find him.
He’s under the bed, cleaning himself. Now realize, no one palpates this cat’s abdomen without drawing back a bloody stump, so I wasn’t about to try. Even given three tranquilizer tablets, Boo can be a dangerous cat to mess with. So I kept him under observation, and checked him for symptoms when I got home: No fever. Water and food consumed. No noticeable blood in the stool, though it wasn’t solid yet, either…
Turned out he was fine. We were damn lucky.
Cured him of eating rubber bands, too.
That was 11 years ago. He’s 13 now, and a cranky old man of a cat. Shits on the living room carpet when he doesn’t get his way, which happens to be a couple times a week. But they’re always firm and solid, like tootsie rolls, so I usually handle it stoically, knowing how bad it could be.
My friend TI0 wasn’t so lucky… his cat Punkin pulled a similar stunt, eating a whole ball of yarn, and he required $6000 of surgery and recovery.
Stupid cats.
