Stripey and Loathing Collars

This is Cheyenne. I generally call her Kitty. You'll see reference to her here, on Twitter, and Facebook as The Stripey One, or Stripey for short.

She was my first non-imaginary or non-fish pet and I love her, even though she's stand-offish and prefers to stare at you from across the room or attack your feet from underneath the bed. I spent the first year experimenting on what people food Cheyenne would eat. Surprisingly, she eats a lot of people food. This includes pineapple.

With the feeding of people food, Stripey developed a people mindset. This is the only explanation I have for her hatred of cat collars.

When we got her from Animal Rescue League, they already had a collar on her with a huge tag. It was bigger than her. I replaced it with a different collar which she pulled off with her teeth. Teeth. If you have a cat with a collar and an ID tag, go take a look at the location of the tag in relation to your cat's mouth. Go ahead, I'll wait.

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Welcome back. It shouldn't be possible that Cheyenne pulls the collar off using her teeth, right? Right. But, she does. I would wake in the morning to find that she was sans collar. (The collar was always hard to find because it always ended up under the bed.) So, I gave up.

After several sneaking out attempts by Lucky, I decided to try collaring Cheyenne again. I even got a new one - red with a shiny matching bell. It was Christmasy and when she scratched at it, I thought of Rudolph. It stayed on her for almost an entire week. Then, I found what you see to the left.

This blurry picture on the left is her collar as I found it. On the floor next to the litter box. It's not open, which only means that she pulled it off over her head. I resurrected the original collar purchased for her. That last one day. It was my second eff you from my cat in just as many days. Just in case her first one was unclear, she made sure I saw this one (see right).

I went back to the red collar, determined to break her. I wanted to win. I refuse to have my 11 pound cat have a stronger will than me.

My 11 pound cat has a stronger will than me. She scratched at the collar so much she created a sore on her neck the length of my middle finger. I was devastated, but glad to find out the sore wasn't infected.

So Stripey won the battle of the cat collar. This time.