Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  If pushed, I would have had to confess that, until meeting Poppy, I hadn’t realised that a Japanese pinto akita was a dog. If anything, I’d have pegged it as a small car, renowned for its tight turning circle and the smart, bespectacled and be-suited women populating its marketing campaign. I wasn’t sure exactly what the dimensions of Poppy’s turning circle were, but I would guess from looking at her now that they wouldn’t have impressed the presenters of Top Gear. She looked like an unusually large Alsatian crossed with a posh skittle. These, however, were observations I was careful to keep to myself under the fraught circumstances.

  Sitting across from me in a chilly room in Liverpool University’s rather touchingly named Small Animal Hospital, Sandra put her head in her hands. ‘It must have been the muffin, mustn’t it?’ she asked Dr Alex German, the founder of Britain’s first ever weight-loss clinic for pets, rhetorically. Poppy, a dog that Sandra had told me was ‘clever’ and hence ‘easily bored’, sat passively at her feet, alongside the scales that had just revealed she had gained a kilogram since her last visit. To me, this was a whole new concept in weight gain. Perhaps a whole basket of muffins could do this much damage, but one? Really? ‘Yes, definitely the muffin. There was nothing else,’ Sandra continued. Nothing apart from the daily 370g of Royal Canin food – a special formula prescribed by German to provide Poppy with protein, vitamins, minerals and L carnitine, an ingredient that speeds up the metabolism and preserves lean tissue during weight loss.

  But suddenly Sandra seemed unsure. She knew she had been strict with Poppy, feeding her separately from her other dogs and walking her for up to an hour on weekdays and two hours every weekend, losing two stone herself in the process. But there had been signs that her husband, Charles, wasn’t quite so committed. German had already had to reprimand him, on a recent visit to the clinic, for letting Poppy help herself to large pieces of leftover chicken. Now Sandra became suddenly worried about further indulgences. ‘He’s just a bit soft,’ she said. ‘He feeds her the way a granny would feed a small child.’

  A few moments later, after Sandra had left, explaining as she did to Poppy that they ‘must have some serious words with Daddy’, Alex shook his head. ‘This happens every so often with joint owners. One will be committed to the programme, but the other just won’t take it seriously. What people have to realise is that to get your pet to lose weight is hard work. It takes all-round discipline.’

  I’d been sent to meet Alex by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, who’d asked me to write an article about the phenomenon of fat pets, after a report had come out suggesting that 40 per cent of Britain’s cats and dogs were overweight, and Petplan, a company that provides insurance for 80,000 pets in the UK, had announced a 60 per cent surge in obesity-related claims for pet health problems in the previous five years. According to Alex, the people of Britain were ‘taking less exercise and eating more meals’ which meant our pets were getting less exercise and more titbits.

  During the course of my research, I’d spoken to the owners of Benji, a formerly gargantuan ginger and white Tom from Hampshire whose profound inertia left him persecuted by the animal they referred to as his ‘brother’, a rabbit who would dive-bomb his enormous frame when he was least expecting it. I’d also heard the story of a dog who ‘couldn’t get enough’ of the faecal pellets that his owner’s rabbit left lying around the house and a parrot who gorged itself on ‘nothing but pizza and pasta’.

  I had to own up to a personal interest in the story, too. I’ve always had a fondness for roly-poly cats and, with Winter Pablo on the rise, rather liked the idea of meeting some other family-sized moggies. If my editor had also mentioned upon commissioning me there was a chance I’d meet a giant, pizza-loving parrot, I would probably have waived my fee on the spot, but on the whole my enthusiasm for overweight pets didn’t extend much further than the feline. A fat dog seemed shameful and sad, but for some reason a plump cat seemed like one of the hallmarks of any good winter living room, alongside a half-open Dickens novel, a log fire and an elderly relative snoring on an armchair with a string of Werthers Original-flavoured drool hanging from his mouth. After an hour with Alex, however, I was beginning to change my mind quite drastically.

  ‘We had a Siamese here that should have been five kilograms but weighed more than thirteen,’ he told me. ‘A lot of people with overweight or obese pets just see them as cuddly. But obesity can lead to numerous illnesses, such as diabetes in cats, osteoarthritis in dogs and pancreatitis, bladder stones and cardio-respiratory and orthopaedic diseases in both.’ Something – I’m not quite sure what – about his expression told me this was not the time to mention the part-joking conversation I’d had in the pub with my friend Tom not long ago about ‘growing’ our cats.

  After Poppy had left, a black cat called Molly was brought into the room. At one point, said her owner, Michelle, Molly’s stomach used to drag along the floor when she walked, which wasn’t often. ‘I used to poke her with a stick and she wouldn’t move. She was a big fan of cheese and onion crisps and liked to eat the butter off toast, but she had really greasy fur and dandruff as well.’ Molly’s weight loss from 6.9 to 6.15 kilograms had left her fur loose around her shoulders. Her head seemed to belong to another, much daintier black cat. That said, unlike Smokey, the grey cat I met immediately after her, she had never looked ‘like a seal’, which is how her owners, Clive and Margaret from Wales, described the X-ray they were given of their pet upon first visiting the clinic. In the eight months since then, Smokey’s chest had been reduced by fifteen centimetres in diameter and she had been able to get upstairs unassisted for the first time in years.

  ‘Have you thought of holding cat aerobic classes?’ Margaret asked Shelley, Alex’s assistant. ‘No, I think that might be a bit difficult to arrange,’ replied Shelley. During this exchange, I’d been lost in a daydream about struggling to help an obese Pablo into a miniature stairlift, so there had been a satellite delay before it registered. I chuckled, belatedly, but it occurred to me that neither Margaret nor Shelley was entirely joking. Alex had, after all, earlier told me about another patient, a gluttonous two-year-old Labrador called Bruce, who regularly attended a water aerobics session in Southampton called ‘Doggypaddles’, held in a luxury hydrotherapy pool purpose-built for dogs.

  Alex told me about the importance of exercise for cats – how they are wrongly perceived as low-maintenance animals and their need for recreation is underestimated. Flashing on a mental image of Ralph meowing his own name outside the bedroom window while Shipley angrily demanded that I wipe the rain off his back with a rose-scented tissue, I tried to think of a time when I’d perceived my cats as low-maintenance, but came up with a blank. Having recently bought them a packet of Zoom-Around-The-Room organic catnip, I also felt sure in saying they were getting a fair amount of exercise. Nonetheless, I was a little nervous as I showed Alex a picture of Pablo on my mobile phone.

  Did Alex think Pablo looked overweight, I wondered.

  ‘Hard to say, looking at this picture. I’d really need to feel around his ribs,’ said Alex. A picture popped into my head of Alex feeling Pablo’s ribs, and Pablo immediately rolling on his back and sticking his tongue out even further than usual, while other, more sophisticated obese cats expressed their disapproval. For the third or fourth time that day, I gave thanks that I hadn’t brought Pablo to Liverpool with me.

  ‘Come in here a moment,’ said Alex, beckoning me through to his office. He double-clicked his computer’s mouse and a short film appeared on his monitor showing a tortoiseshell cat hurling itself maniacally back and forth, head over heels, in front of a battery-operated toy: a yellow plastic stand with a bendy antennae protruding from it, and a small chunk of fur on the end of that. In the background, the buzz of human voices could be heard. ‘That’s my cat, Clarence,’ said Alex. The toy, he said, was a Japanese contraption called the Panic Mouse, and had been instrumental in helping reduce Clarence’s weight. To illustrate, Alex pointed to a picture on his co
rkboard of a younger Clarence, presumably taken around the time Clarence was most liberally exploiting the perks of his job as restaurant critic for the Financial Times. ‘Clarence has really been a bit of a guinea pig for the whole clinic,’ added Alex, who, I was slightly disappointed to find, was yet to put an actual guinea pig on his weight loss programme.

  Twenty minutes after I arrived home from Liverpool, I logged on to panicmouseinc.com and, for the not incon siderable sum of £22.99, purchased a Panic Mouse. ‘Revolutionary in design, The Panic Mouse’s built-in computer board signals a battery-powered motor, creating random and unpredictable ‘mouse-like’ movements,’ I was assured by the website. ‘More than just toys for cats, Panic Mouse interactive cat toys provide hours of fun for both pet and owner. The plastic wand bends and contorts, bouncing back to its original form. The illusive object of cat curiosity: an artificial fur pouch that feels and acts like a real mouse.’ Two days later, as I signed for the Panic Mouse and set it down on the kitchen counter, Shipley quickly and vocally arrived on the scene, followed more languidly by Bootsy and Ralph.

  It was early days, but I couldn’t help asking myself the burning question that had been playing on my mind: could it really be true? Was panicmouse.com really telling the truth in saying that their toy was ‘the much meowed-for answer for playful cats everywhere’?

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Shipley, rubbing the side of his face on the Panic Mouse’s box, then sitting on top of it in his oven-ready chicken pose. Mail time is always a time of day when Shipley feels his input, as an expert on anything pulped, is invaluable, and he will usually help me sort through packages by sitting in a cardboard box or gnawing at a jiffy bag. He also knows that I often buy him presents from a big cat toy shop called amazon.co.uk, some of which he’s found very tasty, though he rarely eats them all in one go. Some of those he’s enjoyed most have included Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, though he was not so keen on Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, owing to its chewy, laminated American jacket.

  ‘It’s a Panic Mouse,’ I replied. ‘It’s going to be really good – particularly since, after you’ve spent some time using it, and people pick you up, they won’t say “Aaaaarrrueegh!” any more and get shooting pains going down their arms.’

  ‘What are you talking about? This box is way too heavy and big to contain a mouse!’

  ‘Well, if you get off the top of it, I’ll open it up with this knife and show you.’

  ‘Mweeew!’ said Bootsy.

  ‘Raaalph!’ said Ralph.

  I still didn’t think any of my cats were obese, but since I’d returned from my meeting with Alex, I was starting to view their physical mass in a more critical light. Was that the beginnings of a tummy Bootsy was developing, and, if so, how long would her tiny frame be able to put up with it? When Ralph had been to the vet last week, was the vet just being polite by calling him ‘chunky’? And was Janet’s slight struggle through the cat flap just the normal movement of a larger-than-average male cat, or the beginning of a slippery slope which would end with me having to attach him to a skateboard in order for him to be successfully transported to his food dish?

  By purchasing the Panic Mouse, I hoped, I had stopped the decline just in time, and sure enough, within a minute of me opening the package, my cats were making ample use of its contents. Bootsy and Pablo spent much of the next hour being vastly entertained by three of the polystyrene beads in which the Panic Mouse had been packed, with The Bear shyly taking over during the mandatory breaks Pablo takes from any leisure activity in order to practise his neutered dry hump on Bootsy. It was also clear that the invoice that panicmouse.com had sent with the toy was to the liking of Shipley’s palate.

  As for the Panic Mouse itself, the results were not quite what I’d anticipated. I’d decided to begin by testing it out on Janet, who, having the IQ of cottage cheese, is usually happy to chase almost anything, not excluding his own foot fur. But as I started the Panic Mouse’s antennae flicking, he gave it only the most cursory of bats, before getting down to the far more vital business of removing some deeply embedded lake scum from his tail.

  Over the following weeks, Dee and I did our best to get the other cats interested in the Panic Mouse, setting the antennae at a variety of different speeds and angles, but their response was similar to Janet’s. Had each of them leaned against it with a cigarette in their mouth, lifted up a foot and struck a match against one of their paw pads, they could not have shown more aloof disregard. When placed in front of it, Ralph mostly just yawned, Shipley swore indignantly at me and wandered off, Bootsy delicately and nonchalantly licked a paw, while The Bear gave me a series of the eloquent, wide-eyed ‘You are joking, right?’ stares that only he can quite perfect. Pablo, meanwhile, seemed downright terrified, bolting outside every time I switched the Panic Mouse on, with a look in his eyes that suggested he had seen a plastic foot soldier of the apocalypse.

  I could see their point: I’m not quite sure why my cats were supposed to think that the Panic Mouse was inherently mouse-like just because somebody had painted some whiskers, eyes and big ears on its smooth yellow base. If you applied the same logic, the giant wooden fish hanging in my entrance hall, carved by my Uncle Paul, would have been driving them wild with hunger for years.

  The part of the Panic Mouse the cats were intended to chase was actually more birdlike than mouse-like. Perhaps a mouse-bird hybrid was an unnatural contravention of some ancient leisure code, like manufacturing a sporting missile that was halfway between a rugby and soccer ball?

  Even so, I suspected that my cats were making a special, concerted group effort to ignore it. The Panic Mouse might have been no better than lower budget, less elaborate toys, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was any worse. I’m sure it wasn’t just my imagination that Pablo, Shipley, Bootsy, Ralph, Janet and even The Bear seemed to be hammering home their disinterest in the Panic Mouse by playing more than usual with other, entirely random loose impediments hanging around the house. I would not have been surprised if, in a further spirit of belligerence, they had left me their own amazon.com-style customer reviews of their other discoveries, complete with star ratings. These would probably include:

  1. The Dried Noodle

  ‘It’s always one of life’s letdowns when your human turns on the hob and it turns out there’s nothing fish- or meat-based in the offing, but sometimes when there’s boiled water involved, it’s worth sticking around. After all, you never know: something brittle and magical might end up on the floor. Noodles might not taste as good as a turkey’s wattle or a mouse’s face, but there’s really nothing finer to bat round a parquet floor on a bored Sunday afternoon – particularly when we’re talking about the dried, uncooked version. Watch, as, under the control of your deft paws, the noodle skitters across the floorboards, under chairs, stools and cabinets! Recline, and stare for literally hours at the curve of the dried unleavened dough! Fantasise, as the noodle becomes a shrew, pike, triceratops or any mythical beast you care to imagine! Forget catnip mice – these cheeky little fellas do it for me every time.’ – Janet

  2. The Random Chunk of Cardboard

  ‘Most cats say boxes are best for sleeping, but that’s just propaganda. And while newspapers are good for casual chewing, nothing feels finer between the teeth than a well-made bit of household packaging. Recent personal favourites include the protective shells for ‘Vax Integra Carpet Washer 7652’ and the latest wireless audio fm transmitter from iStuff, but nothing quite beats the timeless chewability of ‘Big Yellow: This Way Up’. Tear it off in strips or chunks! Casually masticate a corner while your step-brother is curled up peacefully inside! The choices are endless . . .’ – Shipley

  3. The Rotting Pampas Grass Leaf

  ‘The pampas grass is a double-edged sword – and I mean that literally. Given a patient, play-happy owner to hold the other end of the blade, there’s nothing better for playing “Clappy Paws” with. It’s hard not to appreciate the cra
ftsmanship, as you watch it slide across a freshly mown lawn. Squint and you can even convince yourself that it’s an unusually pointy-headed snake. But beware: get over-enthusiastic, and those sharp edges can sting. Not recommended for kittens under 10 weeks old.’ – Ralph

  4. The Bootsy

  ‘Small but perfectly formed, the Bootsy comes in one colour (grey) and is extraordinary lifelike – both in the pained squeaks it emits as you scrag its neck, and in its habit of lying in catlike positions in the crevices of armchairs and duvets. Terrific for indolent neck-biting, back-sitting or – my personal favourite – “The Castrato Hump”.’ – Pablo

  There were some purpose-built, man-made toys my cats still liked. A black, dusty mouse that Dee and I had bought from our local pet shop in 2001 was now in its seventh year of duty, its squeak sometimes vanishing, but then reappearing and reigniting the bloodlust of its users every time I was poised to retire it from service. There was also ‘Camden’: a game devised by Dee which involved draping a feather-on-a-stick toy around the neck of Bootsy, feather boa-style, as she tried to chase it, and which proved very popular with its participant, whose tastes have always run to the glitzy. Then there was the toy known only as The Thing: a small, purple item that had arrived unbidden with a package of overpriced German cat food a month or two after the Panic Mouse.

  The only real merit I could discern in The Thing was that the fur stuck to it seemed extremely – some would say disturbingly – lifelike, yet it was soon to take an unassailable lead in the race for the title of Most Mauled Cat Toy of 2008: a lead that ultimately, despite the efforts of the toy otter from Dee’s childhood that Bootsy liked to kick off her favourite chair, it would never relinquish.

  By this point, the Panic Mouse had been all but forgotten. I relocated it outdoors at one point, with the thought that context might be its main problem, and The Bear minced up to it quite perkily and promisingly, but in the end he just turned around, lifted his tail and unleashed a hot jet of urine into its face, while looking passionately and committedly into the furthest recesses of my eyes. Dee and I began to ask cat-owning friends if they’d like to take it off our hands, but they all had either tried a Panic Mouse before and had similarly dismal results, or were unconvinced by its merits.