I’ve been in and out of my shop several times today. I came out again just a few minutes ago… and happened to noticed a wet, black, furry blob of misery near the corner of my garage in the weeds. The source of the misery? It was a juvenile cat with its head firmed stuck in an old soup can. I grabbed the soup can and picked it up, lifting the cat by the head at the same time; the cat didn’t react at all. I figured it was dead. But it slowly slid out of the can with the same sucking sound as you get when dumping out a can of jellied cranberry sauce, and plopped to the ground with the same sound as, well, a can of jellied cranberry sauce.
Rather than being confronted with a dead cat, though, it was quite alive, and stared at me for half a second with eyes the size of dinner plates… then it took off like a shot towards the nearest horizon.
I’ve seen cats get their head stuck in these things before. Always surprising… with their whiskers, you’d think they’d know better.
13 Responses to “Plop”
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Most do know better but there’s always a few that ride the short bus. Our old tom loved chewing on power cords. He kept getting shocks when he chewed through them but never learned the lesson.
It’s too bad you didn’t get a photo of it with the head in the can when you picked it up, as that would have been hilarious to see.
I’m glad it had a happy ending, but it was probably very lucky that you came along when you did, as there couldn’t be much air in that can.
You may want to rinse out the cans before you throw them away to avoid a repeat of this situation.
Back when I was a kid, we had a squirrel get its head stuck in a old bottle of peanut butter that we had left out for the birds to get some fat value out of in fall. It got out okay, but it’s entire head was covered in peanut butter, and it was quite the sight to watch as it tried to clean its head off with its front feet, rubbing its head and licking its feet alternately.
> that would have been hilarious to see.
Hilarity and cameras were not on my mind at the time, as I thought it was *dead,* especially when I started pulling on the can and it didn’t react. My guess is that it was exhausted, both from exhertion and from restricted breathing… and terrified.
I’ve seen four or five can-headed-cats since I’ve been in Utah. Initially they go truly bonkers, but eventually they just give up. I had a visitor who saw such a cat in my front yard one evening, but thought it was just a clump of dirt or something… in the better light of the next day, we could see what it was. In exactly the same spot. And again it didn’t react when I went up to it, nor when I pulled on the can. A second or two of blinking at the light, then *boom* off over the horizon.
> rinse out the cans
Typically they get stomped flat to prevent just this sort of thing. Sometimes there are oversights.
I’m glad to hear this one went well.
Jim
Fasten a GPS to the cat next time you find one of those, you might have a low-cost orbital solution for microsatellites.
We either need bigger cans or smaller cats! 🙂
It must be able to suck some air in through the fur around its head each time it inhales, or it would run out of air almost immediately. Where would the widest point of the cat’s head be? At the corners of its mouth?
I believe a cats skull is typically wider than tall, so it should be able to get air either above or below. Just not very much.
Yeah , I got out the calipers and put them on the photo, and it is around 25% wider than tall, I suspect the neck seals the bottom pretty well, so any air must come in over the top of the head between the ears when it inhales. The next question is how it can get its head into the can but not be able to pull it back out again; do the backward-facing fur and ears make it hard to remove?
> how it can get its head into the can but not be able to pull it back out again
It’s easy to ram the head in further… just hit something. The ground, a tree, a rock, a house. But what’s there for a cat to figure out how to get leverage on to pull it off?
I took a look at the now-squashed can today. It’s not one of mine. So either a can travelled on its own hundreds of feet from the neighbors… or a blind and terrified cat wandered in sort of a Brownian motion pattern from whereever it found the can to where it finally ended up. It would be nice to think that other cats guided it to my property because they knew it would find assistance. But several things argue against that quaint notion:
A] Cats probably aren’t smart enough to make an association like that
B] If cats *are* that smart, they undoubtedly found Buckethead’s predicament freakin’ *HILARIOUS.*
Cats and enclosed spaces go together… A LOT! We have an “explorer” personality that has to get into everything! If someone sets an open bag or tool-box down in the house, she is RIGHT there. Needless to say we have to warn ever maintenance and repair person who enters the house to check their bags before they leave. (Not that a few havent’ been tempted. After all she’s so CUTE and HELPFULL when she does the whole “Watcha Doin?” thing… The furnace box when we had the Heat Exchanger replaced and the Toilet Drain when the seal went bad are both “Whew!” moments around the house 🙂 )
We had a cat that was apparently in LOVE with Horseradish sauce. My wife made a sandwhich and forgot to put the lid back on. 20 minutes later we hear this “clink-clink-clink” of a glass bottle on the kitchen tile.
We enter to kitchen to see this adult cat up to her shoulders in the bottle, where she’d managed to finish off most of it (so now she could see where she was going) and getting ready to jump down from the counter! We grabbed her and managed to get her head out of the jar (she fought that 🙂 ) but she got a bath and a teeth brushing after that! Her breath could have wilted steel!
Randy
Years and years back, I used to have a beat-up Dodge Charger that had a rust-out on the lower back end. To prevent more water getting into the hole, I pumped it full of polyurethane foam, which began oozing out as it expanded.
A cat came along around 10 minutes later and seemed to be fascinated by the slowly expanding foam.
Before I could get to it to shush it away, the cat had decided it wanted to _smell_ the foam, and ended up running off with a big glob of foam on its nose; I imagine its owners had a hell of a time getting that stuff off of it.
I think a lot of their curiosity is probably due to them being a predator – what looks like a sack or bag to us probably looks like a potential place where mice may be hiding to them.
Just thinking that jellied cranberry crap that tried to lure kitty to its doom is just the remains from the blob. What was that line about not knowing what exactly is in non-dairy creamer? Shades of ‘The Stuff’