My Pet - Ren

I have two pets. This is not all that strange, except that the two pets are somewhat strange. My small family includes Marshall, a 5 year old black cocker spaniel, and his cat Ren (aka Satan), a 4 year old tabby the vet tells us is part lynx.

Ren
We had a somewhat more normal cat (our first), who we called Fred. He literally showed up on our doorstep one day as a kitten and we took him in. We’re not really cat people, but he was a pretty nice first cat. Unfortunately he had some sort of congenital heart problem and only spent about three years with us.

A really nice person offered us a kitten when Fred passed. He was very friendly and had no fear. He even looked a bit like Fred, so we adopted Ren.

Shortly thereafter, it became Xmas, as it is wont to do on a more or less yearly basis. We have this real imitation xmas tree that we assemble and decorate every year (on a more or less yearly basis). My wife goes for the traditional Eeyore and pet ornaments, while I like to personalize things a bit with some Holiday Hanging Vacuum Tubes, cd’s, and assorted computer parts.

Ren was fascinated by this medium-sized green monstrosity in the corner. He was so fascinated that he set about exploring it. We have pictures of our cute little kitty scaling the tree. We also have memories of our cute little kitty scaling my pants (painful memories).

Once he got to exploring he shifted his attention to scientific experimentation, in the form of discovering and playing with gravity. He found it fascinating that the round shiny balls would leave the tree with only the most minute of effort, then plummet to the floor, culminating in a most wonderful crash as they shattered into hundreds of pieces each.

As we know, the hallmark of any good scientific experiment is that it’s repeatable. And repeat he did. CRASH - another one. CRASH - a third. He took notice that they always fell in a downward direction, always breaking up on impact. After a few more boxes, he was satisfied that this gravitic experiment would yield consistent results and turned his attention to the xmas lights.

The strings of blinky lights obviously would not plummet to the ground the same way the round balls did. He tried, but they would not dislodge. My wife became alarmed that he might inadvertently discover electricity, but I calmed her fears by assuring her that it would be a very valuable lesson. She was not amused.

I was not amused when Ren turned his attention toward the tree itself.
He went to town on it, attempting to dislodge each branch individually and collectively. When not all of the branches could not be pursuaded to launch themselves downward, he decided to expedite the process by knocking the entire tree over.

Great… we got the smart cat.

This had only gone on for a few days, yet it had become more than merely tedious. We actually had to tie the tree to the wall so it would stay up. But in an attempt to verify his gravitic research, he continued to launch ornaments at the unsuspecting ground. At this point, even my wife was no longer impressed with the scientific prowess of her newest addition.

It might have been about this point that he picked up his first nickname: the Furry F*#@er.

Momentarily bored with that particular branch of science, he decided to go for something a bit more advanced: the gas oven. Like all cats, he would randomly launch himself up onto counters, as if chasing some unseen xmas tree ball. One day we came home to find a funny smell in the house. A quick check revealed that on his way up, he turned on two burners, but only the gas.

Yes, our very own cat tried to kill us by blowing up the entire house with himself in it. It turned out that perhaps he wasn’t as smart as he thought after all…..

This little trick earned him his next coveted title: Satan.

He became visibly agitated when he discovered we removed the stove knobs, so he could no longer try to blow up the house. Whether or not this is some kind of retarded Darwinism, I’ll leave up to you.

Bored and in need of entertainment, Satan went back to Tree Science. By this time he had run out of xmas balls to smash. This happened largely because my wife ran out of patience replacing the ornaments so the little bastard could destroy them.

Devoid of multiple gravity experiments to smash, he resumed taking apart the tree. If he failed, he simply climbed high enough to knock the entire apparatus over.

Perplexed, I asked my wife what to do. She suggested we might need a plexiglas shield for the tree. I suggested we get a plexiglas shield for the cat.

This cat did not mess with the tree so much as disembowel it.

Completely bereft of patience (moreso than normal), I became the first person to FLY an xmas tree. Yes, I hung the thing from the ceiling. Not to be outdone, Satan figured out how to jump up and remove a section or two from the bottom of the tree. Regardless of moving things around and replacing the sections, our little darling would relaunch himself at them until they too fell.

By the end of the season, we had one twelve-inch section of xmas tree hanging from the ceiling. The only reason we had that at all is that Ren couldn’t figure out how to get the ladder over to the tree area to finish the job.

Not that he wasn’t acutely aware of the remaining tree segment…. no sir… he would circle around underneath the lone bit of imitation tree top, desperately trying to figure out how to eradicate it. We never discovered whether he simply hated the tree or had to destroy it because we liked it. We would try every few years to put up our tree, but each time the little darling would restart his disemboweling activities, as if they were fresh and he was a young kitten, in search of scientific enlightenment.

The only thing we have left at xmas is wrapping the presents.
Unfortunately Satan was on to us here also. The moment I rolled the wrapping paper out onto the floor, Satan would appear out of nowhere and lay right smack in the middle of things. When I got audibly agitated, he would acknowledge it by looking in the other direction. After I finally got my point across, there were hundreds of individual kitty nail holes in the paper I was going to wrap with.

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To say that Ren is tenacious is to say that Hitler wasn’t teribly fond of Jews. It didn’t take long to figure out who fed him and set about modifying the feeding schedule. Rather than simply asking that he be fed more frequently, he decided to make us work for it a bit. He figured he’d like to get fed a bit earlier than normal and asked politely, in the form of blasting through the bedroom door at seven in the morning and leaping onto the bed. He is not a fat cat but he is a very long cat. When this amount of cat lands on you, you tend to notice it (regardless of whether you’re awake or not).

He knew if you were faking being asleep. If pouncing upon your sleeping form wasn’t sufficient to get you moving, he very quickly changed strategies and took to clawing and shredding the mattress. At this point, getting up became mandatory, if only to launch convenient objects (or furniture) at him.

Determined not to be dictated to by a cat, we shut the bedroom door. Determined not to be ignored, Ren would find a way to get in the room. When we started locking the door, he’d hurl all twenty or so of his pounds at the door. BANG. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. If we somehow managed to ignore that, he’d claw at the door. This had roughly the same effect as nails on a chalkboard. Right about this time, I invented what we refer to as Feline Aviation.

Eventually my wife had no choice but to exit sleep as well as the room, in order to FEED THE CAT. When she came downstairs, he’d dart, in the cutest way, between her legs and into the kitchen. He was adorable. And it was adorable the way my wife would then fall down the remaining steps, reinjuring herself several times per year.

I don’t want to suggest that Satan is malicious - far from it. To give you an example of his spontaneous caring nature, when my wife was too crippled to trip down the steps yet again, he would merely walk in front of her, slowing down as if to `herd’ her from far ahead.