Some Cats Get Mean on Catnip
I discovered years ago that the Muffin Man is a mean drunk, and by “drunk,” I mean catnip sniffer. He gets one hit of catnip up his little pink nose and he starts picking fights.
Because of the ice and snow, I’ve been home for two days with the cats, long enough to want Scooter to just calm the heck down. Stop stalking Fat Zombie already, cat! Scooter is wild. When he isn’t viciously attacking furniture, he’s picking fights with the other cats. Sometimes, I think he wants to play. But mostly, he’s trying to establish some kind of dominance, despite being the youngest cat in the house. Scooter hasn’t even reached his full growth yet. He’s not the smallest cat — that would be Winnie — but he’s a lot smaller than his favorite victim, Fat Zombie.
So I decided to see if catnip would calm him down. “What you gonna do if it makes him mean?” my sister asked before I tried my little experiment.
“Lock him in the bathroom, I guess.”
The short version of this story is that Scooter did, indeed, end up in the bathroom. I sprinkled some catnip in the guest room, and he found it right away and began rolling in it. But then the other cats came to investigate, including Fat Zombie. Scooter pinned his ears back and lifted his paw to strike.
“No. Scooter, be nice.”
Scooter doesn’t actually listen to me when I tell him to Be Nice, although he has figured out that he can’t actually attack his siblings if I’m standing right there watching him. I stayed between him and Fat Zombie (actually, Fat Zombie hid behind me, but he doesn’t want me to tell anyone that). Eventually, I could see Scooter was getting more agitated, looking for another cat to beat up, so I picked him up and put him in the bathroom.
The experts say you should separate your cats and give them catnip individually to avoid fights. I suppose I should have done that in the first place, but I’ve gotten pretty comfortable breaking up fights, I guess. Still, I can’t blame Scooter for his behavior — I should have put him in the bathroom before I gave him catnip.
By the time I let him out, he was feeling groovy. He went back to the spot where I had sprinkled catnip and rolled around a bit. I played with him a little, and he was a little more chill than normal — he didn’t even try to tear my arm off. All in all, the catnip worked — but next time, his first ten minutes of using ‘nip will be spent locked in the bathroom.
