While it can hardly be said that I am happy to have dumped Koshka off with my parents, after a week in an apartment I see that it was a neccesary evil: having three cats in this apartment would have been a disaster. Being an adult, I had long thought that the days of apartment life were behind me; the very notion of renting rather than buying just seems, well, unAmerican for an adult. For kids, sure. College students and those just recently sent out into the world… apartments are decent enough *temporary* housing. But they are not to be lived in for long. They are places of residence, not homes.
My two remaining cats clearly feel the same way. After living in a good Utah house, a small Maryland apartment with about a third the floorspace just isn’t doing it for them. Tak has become suprisingly aggressive with Raedthinn… she will pounce on him, rip a wad of fur from him and merrily chew it and swallow it down. Bleah. I’m unclear as to the why of that, but I’m guessing it’s either a “power” or “frustration” thing. Raedthinn, on the other hand, has become inventive. Lil’ bastard has figured out how to open doors. This is especially disturbing as his first thought upon opening a door is to burst through, find me and jump on me to prove that he’s an accomplished explorer… and at 3AM, that’s disconcerting to say the least.
Tak giving me her “well, what are you going to do about this situation?” look.
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Tak is not shy about voicing her displeasure.
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This is the sight that greets me on my return from work.
3 Responses to “Cats and apartments”
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Here’s one for you; why do the cat’s eyes reflect light in different colors?
I could see the irises being different colored, but the reflection is off of the retina at the back of the eye, so why is Tak’s orange and Raedthinn’s green-blue? That’s shown up on a lot of the photos you’ve taken of them.
Is the lens of their eyes tinted differently somehow?
For whatever reason, blue eyed cats reflect red eyeshine. Some difference in the tapetum lucidum.
That’s interesting; it suggests that blue-eyed cats have a genetic modification in their eyes that allows greater night vision at the expense of less UV protection… something that suggests that blue-eyed cats have modified their genes since their African ancestry, much in the way that humanity has developed lighter skins in northern latitudes to assure adequate Vitamin D production by letting UV penetrate the skin, rather than having the darker melanin-rich and UV-protecting skin of our original Homo Sapien ancestors from Africa.
Of course, given the short lifespans of cats compared to humanity, far more rapid genetic evolution is a given.
I’ve never read up on the detailed evolutionary history of the house cat, but one can suspect that humanity might have had a lot to do with the evolution of blue-eyed breeds (after all, if you are living in a domicile of some sort rather than outside, you don’t need much UV protection at all), and that the blue-eyed cats might be a pretty modern genetic variation in a historic sense.
Against this idea stand the blue-irised leopards, although I know nothing of their eye refection color at night.
It also could be based on nocturnal versus diurnal hunting habits, although one would suspect that that would have averaged out in modern house cats due to great interbreeding in historical times.
Certainly, “Siam” our blue-eyed Siamese cat from my youth has active during the day and slept at night.
That was a great cat…that was a _really_ great cat.
Pat