The Case of the Shampooed Cat

While I was at Barnes & Noble this Christmas wrapping books for donations for The Friends of Feral Felines, I heard some really funny and heartwarming cat stories from customers. I was very pleased at how many people told me their cat or cats were rescued ferals. The one story that stuck in my mind is a particularly charming tale and so I thought I would recount it for everyone. Unfortunately I did not get the woman’s name so I will have to improvise names and embellish the details for all involved in the tale of The Case of the Shampooed Cat.

Our heroine, we’ll call her Margaret, had rescued two female feral cats near her home. Occasionally she let the cats outside to play but they always came back in when called. The older cat, Emily, wore a black collar and the younger one, Lilly, wore a red one. Emily had already been spayed but Lilly had not. Margaret told her teenage son, we’ll call him Todd, to be very careful not to let Lilly outside when he left for school one morning. Margaret was upstairs trying to get ready for her day when she heard her son leave. A while later she went downstairs to clean up the kitchen. Tidying up the sink she looked out the window into her backyard.

To her dismay she saw her Lilly in an intimate embrace with the neighborhood scoundrel! Shocked, she vowed to have words with Todd later. She waited until the two cats said their farewells and she went to the door and sweetly called Lilly to come in the house. I’m sure it was more like “You hussy, get your tramp cat butt in this house right now!” Well you can imagine Lilly shamefully skulked into the house avoiding eye contact with Margaret.

Once in the kitchen an unexpected confrontation ensued. Not between Margaret and Lily but between Lilly and Emily. At once Emily started hissing and went for the jugular on Lilly. Margaret frantically tried to get them apart wondering what would cause Emily to attack Lilly when they normally got along so well. She separated them and put Lilly in a bathroom and Emily in a bedroom. Not understanding what just occurred, she called her friend and told her what happened. Her friend, we’ll call her Sarah, said “Oh Emily probably smells the male cat’s scent on Lilly so you should give her a bath”.

Sounded like good advice so Margaret decided to wait until her daughter got home to help her with the cat bath. Several hours later Margaret’s daughter, we’ll call her Tina, arrived home and after hearing the whole sordid story agreed to help bathe Lilly. They cautiously entered the bathroom where Lilly was contained, still looking ashamed of herself for her torrid love affair and fur flying girl fight. Or maybe she was miffed only because she had gotten caught in her lover’s paws. One never knows what cats are really thinking.

Margaret and Tina ignored Lilly’s protests, took off the red collar and proceeded to give her a bath, which to say the least, did not go very well. We’ll censor the verbal spewing from the bathing episode as to not offend anyone. Once bathed and being towel dried, Margaret asked Tina to hand her the cat’s collar. Tina picked up the red collar and looked at it. “Mom”, she said, “I don’t think this is Lilly’s collar”.

They looked at each other. They looked at the angry cat wrapped in the towel. They looked at the red collar. They looked at the cat again. They both cried out “This isn’t our cat!” Hysterical laughter erupted. After they placed the red collar back on the mystery cat they released her out the back door from whence she came. She took off through the yard as if shot from a cannon, happy to escape the crazy house. You can hear Aretha Franklin singing “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, yeah!”

The real Lilly, wearing her red collar, was found sleeping under a bed quite content and unaware of the previous drama. She only protested slightly when hugged and fussed over as if she had been lost for days. She got some cat treats out of the ordeal and went back under the bed. Emily, formally forgotten in her prison bedroom, ate her treats slowly and looked at Margaret with disdain as if to say “I was right, you were wrong”. She whined, moaned and proceeded to give everyone the touch-me-not treatment for two days.

Still to this day Margaret would have liked to have seen the reaction of the visiting cat’s real owner when she made it back home, missing for hours, damp and smelling of fresh shampoo.