Wonder twins activate: shape of a cat
Jul. 11th, 2007 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amanda_loddenLast week, we had my mom over for the 4th of July (why yes, I am behind in posting, why do you ask?). This was a major accomplishment, as it required her to stand up from her wheelchair long enough to get into and out of the car. She enjoyed her excursion out of the nursing home (she's only there for physical therapy, but it's slow going and frustrating, and she feels a bit trapped). She especially enjoyed seeing her cats, who are currently taking an extended vacation at our house where they can be cuddled and played with on a more regular basis-- driving 20 minutes to her house to feed them every day was killing us.
However, she got confused about which cat was which. See, she has a black cat and a tiger-striped cat, and we have a black cat and a tiger-striped cat. The two black cats are sufficiently different that it's easy to tell Inky (her fully-black cat) from Kira (our white-pawed, white-chested black cat). But the tiger-striped cats look very much alike, especially to a woman who last saw our tiger-striped kitten when he was half the size he is now.
So, without further ado, I present a guide to the cats in our house. Fair warning, it's picture-intensive.
Like parents of identical twins, John and I can tell the cats apart fairly easily. To us, just their faces are different enough:
This is Sisko, our kitten.
This is Ichabod, Mom's cat.
It would have been better if I could have gotten both pictures to be from the same angle, but part of the difference between the cats is that Sisko is much more inquisitive and unwilling to stare at a boring human when there are plenty of fairies and dust motes to attract his attention. If you spot a cat who is into something he ought not to be into, it's nearly guaranteed to be Sisko:
Except sometimes, when it's Inky:
To give that last picture of Sisko a little bit of perspective, this is the wide-angle view, so you can see exactly where he is:
In contrast, Mom's cats like to cuddle. If you spot a cat who is cuddling with whoever or whatever it can find, it's one of Mom's cats:
But there's only one cat in the house that sits still for any length of time, and that's Kira:
The other way you can tell Sisko and Ichabod apart is by watching how they lay down:
Ichabod is sedate.
Sisko is not sedate.
That's not Sisko in "play mode", he lays in weird positions even when he is fully asleep:
This is Sisko in play mode:
Thus ends the guide to cat identification. If you're still confused, come over at pet them both. Ichabod will cuddle up to you and rub himself against you to get more petting. Sisko will let you scratch his ears for a minute or two before tiring of it and going off to kill a toy mouse.
However, she got confused about which cat was which. See, she has a black cat and a tiger-striped cat, and we have a black cat and a tiger-striped cat. The two black cats are sufficiently different that it's easy to tell Inky (her fully-black cat) from Kira (our white-pawed, white-chested black cat). But the tiger-striped cats look very much alike, especially to a woman who last saw our tiger-striped kitten when he was half the size he is now.
So, without further ado, I present a guide to the cats in our house. Fair warning, it's picture-intensive.
Like parents of identical twins, John and I can tell the cats apart fairly easily. To us, just their faces are different enough:
This is Sisko, our kitten.
This is Ichabod, Mom's cat.
It would have been better if I could have gotten both pictures to be from the same angle, but part of the difference between the cats is that Sisko is much more inquisitive and unwilling to stare at a boring human when there are plenty of fairies and dust motes to attract his attention. If you spot a cat who is into something he ought not to be into, it's nearly guaranteed to be Sisko:
Except sometimes, when it's Inky:
To give that last picture of Sisko a little bit of perspective, this is the wide-angle view, so you can see exactly where he is:
In contrast, Mom's cats like to cuddle. If you spot a cat who is cuddling with whoever or whatever it can find, it's one of Mom's cats:
But there's only one cat in the house that sits still for any length of time, and that's Kira:
The other way you can tell Sisko and Ichabod apart is by watching how they lay down:
Ichabod is sedate.
Sisko is not sedate.
That's not Sisko in "play mode", he lays in weird positions even when he is fully asleep:
This is Sisko in play mode:
Thus ends the guide to cat identification. If you're still confused, come over at pet them both. Ichabod will cuddle up to you and rub himself against you to get more petting. Sisko will let you scratch his ears for a minute or two before tiring of it and going off to kill a toy mouse.
