Rex, King of Nature

Rex would like nothing more than to frolic, free, in the back yard. He wants to chase the butterflies and roll around in the warm mulch and eat bugs and terrorize birds. This is not allowed, though, because we live on busy East Lake and there is a large hawk that likes to hang out in our back yard. I'd been avoiding mentioning that we think he took out our chickadee family, but there you are.

Each day when we arrive home from work/school/daycare, we enter through the kitchen door, and Rex is quietly waiting. He darts past my feet into the garden, under some plant or another. Kate dutifully trudges out, scoops up the recalcitrant cat, and carries him back in. He always looks so defeated. Poor little guy. I'd love to let him go play, were I not worried I'd be scraping him off the blacktop later.

The other day we watched a special on PBS about agility training for pets. They started with dogs, no big news there, but then they moved on to cats and Kate was fascinated. "I'm going to work with cats now", she informed me, after watching all things cats could be trained to do. I decided that since Rex wanted so badly to be outdoors, I would let Kate work with him. So, I picked up a kitty harness called Come With Me Kitty, which I thought seemed to bode a bit ill because it sounds like kitty's about to get in trouble. Still, it was worth a shot.

Rex sat peacefully in my lap while I fitted the device on him. Then I took him out for a trial run. I carried him outside, and he instantly laid down, rolled over on his back and looked angry. So that went well. Kate has tried twice with him now. This is not what Rex had in mind when I said to him "Rex, would you like to go outside?" and his heart leapt. Oh, cruel irony of life. He is most likely looking for something of mine to pee on as I write this.