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TuggerAugust 15, 2009 Tugger and Theo are the barn cats. Theo is light gray with white feet and facial markings. Tugger is solid dark gray. The two of them together probably weigh close to 40 pounds, which is why the shelf they eat on is breaking away from the tack room window. The morning chores person gives them a half cup of kitty kibble in their (small) feed bowl, and the evening person puts the bowl back in the cat food bin. To spare the food shelf, a length of 1-by-4 board, we sometimes put a handful of food on the bench under the window. It's usually Tugger who snags the feeding station that demands less exertion. The trouble with the bench is that it's at nose level for a large dog, which is why when Travvy gets out of the truck at the barn he wants to go immediately to the tack room to see what's around for snacking. Travvy, in case I haven't mentioned it lately, is great with other dogs and with people but completely unreliable around small animals, especially small animals moving rapidly away from him. Three times now he has caught a skunk and been sprayed for his efforts; in each case, as far as I know, the skunk escaped unharmed. When Theo is eating or Tugger is sprawled on an Adirondack chair outside, I let Trav -- on leash, of course -- approach within a few feet and sit. Then we play the "Look at That" game -- when he's looking at the cat, I say "Look at that!" and click, then when he reorients to me I click and give him a treat. Sometimes the cats pretend to ignore him. Other times they hiss. So Thursday morning it was drizzling a bit so instead of tethering Travvy outside I attached his leash to one of the crossties in the barn's main aisle. This gives him plenty of room to lie down and move around a bit, but the radius of crosstie + leash only reaches about three-quarters of the way across the aisle, so there's plenty of room for a cat to get by. I'd just dumped the wheelbarrow in the manure pile and was standing in the barn door when Tugger comes sauntering across the lawn in my wake. Travvy is, of course, rapt. Tugger steps onto the concrete floor of the barn. Travvy is quivering with anticipation. Tugger keeps coming. Right down the middle of the aisle. I am frozen in place. Travvy starts to move. Tugger turns and snarls at him. Travvy pounces. Tugger is in his mouth. I pounce. I grab Travvy around the neck from behind and yell, "DROP IT!" He hesitates a moment, then he lets Tugger go. Tugger makes a beeline for the ladder and escapes to the hayloft. Now what? I praise Travvy for obeying the "drop it" command and hope he doesn't take this to mean that I think cats are fair game. Then I climb the ladder to look for Tugger. His speed and agility are a good sign: if neck or back were broken, he couldn't have managed it, and his legs all seemed to be working fine. When Rhodry was seven or so, he and a buddy had cornered a cat belong to the buddy's owner. No one saw what happened, but the cat wound up with a punctured lung and died in surgery. So I'm seriously worried about the possibility of internal injury. Travvy has powerful teeth. For a while there I sported band-aids on the knuckles of my left thumb and forefinger because Travvy dinged them so often snatching the treats I was offering him, and he wasn't trying to take my fingers off. "Harder than finding a needle in a haystack" means "impossible." Finding a cat in a well-stocked hayloft isn't much easier. Finding a cat who doesn't want to be found is likewise futile, and I'm not 100 percent sure I want to find the cat. Schrödinger rules: As long as I don't know Tugger is dead, dying, or seriously injured, then Tugger is OK. I move some bales around and peer behind them. It's hopeless. There are too many bales, and the only available light is what comes up from the center aisle or through the cracks in the door. I give up. All day I'm hoping that when I show up to do evening chores Tugger will be chowing down on the food shelf or sprawling on one of the chairs outside. After all, the da Silvas' white rooster survived the Jaws of Travvy, if only to meet the stew pot a few weeks later, and Travvy had dropped Tugger a lot faster than he dropped the rooster. But when I arrive, it's Theo who's at the food bowl. Tugger is nowhere in sight. Mark appears with Bleu, the Briard. I tell him what happened. He goes to check out the hayloft but doesn't find anything either. Friday I don't go to the barn till late afternoon. There's a note from Breeze about paddock arrangements and at the end it says, "No sign of Tugger. :-(" I climb up to the hayloft. I don't really expect to see Tugger stretched out on top of a bale of hay. If Tugger is OK, he's probably long since left the loft to nurse his trauma somewhere else. But the weather has turned warm and humid, and I take heart that the hayloft smells only of hay -- not, for instance, of decomposing cat. The glimpse of gray I catch on the Adirondack chair favored by Tugger turns out, of course, to be Theo. Theo shows no interest in Tugger's absence. It could be that he is keeping Tugger's whereabouts secret from the enemy, but I suspect he doesn't really care. Neither does Travvy. For Travvy the incident is long forgotten. He doesn't hold a grudge against me for making him drop his catch. Prey drive is prey drive, and in malamutes it often runs strong. Whatever distinction a dog makes between cats and rabbits is learned behavior, and at some point -- higher in some dogs, lower in others -- drive trumps learned behavior almost every time. This afternoon I get to the barn late. When I see Mark, I ask if there's been any sign of Tugger, hoping that whatever sign there might have been isn't a stench or a corpse. But no: Mark reports that Breeze saw him earlier in the day and he was fine. Whew. Next time, Tugger, take the long way around the dog.
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