Funny Adventures in Cat Adoption, Part Seven - The CATNIP Caper

Yes, we own some. We do not dispense it daily, not even weekly, because our cats are active enough without it. Well, maybe not our dear Sammy with his love-handles. Nonetheless, we occasionally give it to our threesome.

Now, I am re-thinking having any in our house at all. That’s due to what I walked into when getting home from work yesterday.

Apparently (as Sherlock Holmes did so brilliantly, we are forced to deduce), there was a WILD cat party here yesterday afternoon.

I entered the kitchen to find green flakes all over the floor. The two boy cats lounged, that’s the best word for it, amongst the detritus. Our matriarch tabby lolled in the next room. The evidence, the “smoking gun,” was a package of catnip on the floor, savagely ripped open in the middle. More trails of catnip sat on a kitchen counter beneath an open cabinet door.

It wasn’t making sense to me. If they were “high on catnip,” the cats should have been whirling around the house like a clothes washer on final spin cycle. So, either the catnip was very stale or…..

MyGuy was home. Obviously, he had not been in the kitchen since this covert operation commenced. But, hadn’t he heard anything? With more deduction, we assume that when he returned home exhausted from an afternoon job, he collapsed semi-comatose in the TV room on the lower level. That was still his state when I arrived. On questioning, MyGuy recalled hearing “body slamming” upstairs, but our three cats are known to do this without the benefit of drugs. Thus, he tuned it out (his parenting style is much more laid back than mine.) Well, talk about a ruckus - this must have been a Lou Lou! So, by the time I came on the scene the felines were sated and exhausted, we guess.

You may ask, can Skeeter (because we ALL know he was the instigator) open cabinet doors? As far as we know: not yet.

MyGuy sometimes (often) leaves kitchen cabinet doors open. I don’t know why. For un-rememberable reasons, I had stuffed a new catnip package in a different cabinet from usual - thus, the stage was set.

Can Skeeter rip open a plastic package? Absolutely.

Can we continue with energetic Skeets prowling the kitchen countertops in search of opportunity? Absolutely not. (The other two older, staid cats save their forbidden prowling for times we are not present. Skeeter, however, has gotten away with bad behavior.)

Time for help, which includes advice my fellow hubbers. Stay tuned.

Copyright text and photos 2011 Maren Morgan