No Extraordinary Family: Happy Bath Day

Cats, as everyone who knows anything about cats can tell, do not like baths. As a rule, they feel very strongly about hygiene and are usually quite clean through their grooming efforts. However, they do need to be given baths once in a while due to reasons of cleanliness and skin health as well as the heat during summer. My boys received their first bath of the season and, indeed, of the year, a few days back. As always, each of them reacts differently to the bath, their responses ranging from slightly neurotic to completely psychotic. Below I will describe the four types of reactions; let’s see if you can guess who fits the reaction: Frodo, Sam, Merry or Pippin. Write your answers in Comments.

1. He doesn’t mind the water too much and even though his eyes grow as round as saucers, like the dog in the tinderbox story, he doesn’t really struggle too much until after the shampoo has been lathered onto him. Even when he thrashes about to escape, he does not shout too loudly. However, if one isn’t very careful, he can quickly slip away from one’s hand. He is really clever about that. If he is in a bad mood, he might bite also, though not hard. He does not lick himself for quite some time and lets the water dry on its own.

2. He is not easy to bathe because he is very strong. He does shout and struggle but not too unmanageably. His bath takes the longest because he is usually the dirtiest. It is really quite a fight to get him to stick around until the bath is done. He kisses us a lot to persuade us to let him go. When he feels really determined to escape, one person cannot hold on single-handedly. He prefers to groom his brothers to help them dry rather than groom himself. He also might get soot or cobwebs on his face and coat within half an hour after the bath.

3. He is the easiest to manage because he does not shout too much or fight too hard. He does struggle to some extent, though, and kisses us a lot. He is actually one of the easiest to give a bath to though he does not like it at all. He usually goes last because he is the easiest to handle and after the other three we are too tired to really fight a cat trying to run away with shampoo smeared all over. The best part is that he is very meticulous about drying himself off. Even if he is the last to be given a bath, he will invariably be the first to dry off.

4. He is the worst! Not because he struggles very hard, which is manageable, but because he absolutely hollers his head off! To hear him one would think that he was being tortured with hot pokers or something from a hall of horrors. He just hates being given a bath and minces no words (or meows, rather) to express that. By the time he is done, we feel completely exhausted. He also spooks the others with his howling, so we don’t usually start with him. He, again, does not lick himself dry, though he has the softest coat of the four.

So, that’s that about the four. In the next post, I will write a bit more about the bath question. For now, enjoy guessing! And here are some pictures. The first one is of them as kits. It was taken when we had visited Kolkata in 2010. The rest are from the latest bathing session.