Battle Cat Strikes Again

Last week I had to travel to Victoria to deliver a training over Halloween. The training went well and I came home on Thursday.

May picked me up at the airport at South Lake Union and homecoming involved the usual greeting from white fluffy Wakea bouncing up and down. Moments later, on queue Gabe appeared sitting pretty on the kitchen floor. I scooped him up and as usual he started to purr.

"He has some sap stuck on his paw," May said, poking gingerly at his left paw.

I looked. "That's not sap. It looks like blood." I pushed the fur aside and looked down into the raw red meat and sinew of his paw.

May went pale.

Surprisingly, Gabe seemed unbothered by the wound. He already cleaned it and was not in any obvious pain. Luckily, it was still mid-afternoon.

I called the Cat Clinic of Seattle and we rushed him down there. There the excellent staff took good care of him. He went in for surgery that night and came home the next day with several stitches in his left paw and wearing a cone. The cone is quickly becoming Gabe's trademark.

Sigh...Gabriel. That cat! To everyone Gabe deems to grace his presence with he is a lover not a fighter. But once he gets outside, he is a territorial brawler. An enforcer of the Russian mafia masked by a cute, gray fur covered facade.

Sad to say, he frequently comes off on the bad end of those conflicts. Two years ago it was a huge gash on his left thigh. Last year an infected puncture wound. And now this. Gabe, my sweet lovable lap cat (where he is right now), has added yet another nickname to the litany of others: Battle Cat.

For the first 4-1/2 years of his life Gabe was a purely indoor cat. I lived in a top-floor apartment on one of the busiest streets in Fremont. There was no way he was going to be an outdoor cat in that environment. My current home gives Gabe a good buffer from the busy streets nearby, so he has realized his lifelong dream of going outside (at least during daylight hours).

I am told that cats who start off indoor-only are often very territorial and Gabe appears to be a perfect manifestation of that assertion. He is so much happier going outside. But this is his third go around with the cone.

I'm torn between keeping him safe and indoors, but clearly not happy, and letting him outdoors where his is obviously happy but at risk of injury or worse mostly due to his own aggressive defense of territory. He cries at the door all day long in long plaintive mewling or polysyllabic mews and chirps. He stares at me or May and every time we go to the kitchen he runs full speed (quite a sight in the cone) expectant that the back door will open and allow him to venture through his territory.

Well, I don't know whether Gabe will remain an outdoor kitty, but he has another week in the cone, probably two ore three more weeks minimum before the wound has healed thoroughly and the fur grown back. Then it's the holidays and I'll keep him indoors anyway. So it will be near the new year by the time I have to make a real decision.

Gabe is generally an upbeat critter, but he is clearly got himself a case of kitty depression. Aside from the mewling his energy is lower, all he wants to do is sit on my lap all day. That's unusual even for him. He's actually needy instead of the independent-yet-affectionate cat who comes in once in a while to get food and grace you with his royal presence.

Poor kitty.