Chris Pascoe encounters a strange pair of ‘cats’ with a special set of defensive skills.
I’ve been looking after a strange pair of cats over the past week, and the strangest thing of all is that one of them is a rabbit. When I arrived for my cat-sitting ‘pre-visit’, whereby I nip round to new client’s homes to collect a key, list their requirements and fill them with dread when they realise my general levels of ineptitude (providing ‘peace of mind’, we call it) I was surprised to find a cat named Barry and a rabbit named Tallulah asleep together in a basket.
‘That’s not a cat!’ I blurted out. Okay, probably about the most stupidly obvious thing anybody could ever say, but in my defence, there hadn’t been any mention on the phone of a rabbit to look after. ‘Very observant!’ said my customer, accentuating my ‘most stupid comment’ observation. ‘But, but...is that rabbit safe?’ I asked,‘Doesn’t Barry attack her?’ ‘No, no,’ laughed my customer, ‘Never! They get on great. It’s the other way round if anything – sometimes Tallulah kicks him in the face.’
Oh, well that’s nice, I thought. During the course of our conversation, I learnt that Barry the tabby is a very old lad, 17 in fact, and far too wobbly and doddery to think about attacking anything. Meanwhile, the young, sprightly Tallulah, a house-rabbit, free to roam the home and trained to use a litter tray, is the brains of the pair, and while tolerating most of Barry’s ways, she finds him brushing up against her, cat-style, totally unacceptable, and it’s then that she turns on her haunches and back-kicks him in the face, Thumper-style. One other thing she doesn’t like about Barry, especially as she obviously possesses that acute rabbit sense of smell, is his over-enthusiastic flatulence. When Barry lets rip, I was told, any rabbit in the world would probably rather run for the fields and take their chances with the foxes. Indeed, they felt that Tallulah’s frequent attempts at escape whenever a door’s left open, could well be attributed to Barry. It
