Life with Cats: Verbing Nouns Edition

I’ll be darned. I just verbed the word ‘asshole.’

I love muh kittehs. I give ’em treats. But I make them work for the treats. They have to chase, stalk, find, and get the treats. And for fairness, I have to separate them as I do it. So I stand in the kitchen where I can toss one treat across the linoleum floor toward the utility room and the other across the hardwood floor heading into the living room. It’s best when it’s dimly lit. They’re quite good at chasing them sight unseen from the little tikkytikkytick sound of the crunchy treat skipping across the floor. And when that’s not enough, their sniffy little snoots do the rest.

Usually the arrangement works really well and they keep to their leg of the angle. Not tonight. Dean is a chonky powerhouse. Sam, his sister, is petite but fast. So immediately on snatching up her treat, she hears (for the bajilliontieth time) the tikkytikkytik over by Dean and tears ass around the corner to pursue that one. And even though he had the advantage of proximity, and he was moving pretty quickly himself (it’s a fun scramble to watch), she beat him to it. So I toss one back toward the utility, she tears after it. Dean looks confused. I toss him one, she tears around the corners and steals his treat. Now, this is like a 20′ distance given the corner, so that little shit is putting in some serious greedy energy to get Dean’s treats.

So I toss three in a cluster back toward her section. She races in, snatches one, eyeballs the next, hears the tikkytikkytik of Dean’s treat and leaves her two behind to steal his one.

She looks back to me. I fake her out with a fake toss. She runs back into the kitchen, hears no tick, looks confused, steps on an existing treat, and in her frenzy, shoots it across the floor under the fridge.

“Haw, haw, did you just asshole that treat right under fridge?”