And He's No Better At Chemistry

Toby is an outdoor cat, but we keep him on a leash, for various reasons. One: we have a crazy neighbour that scatters birdseed on her front lawn, and then gets angry at the dozens of cats that come from far and wide to partake of the avian buffet that she has created, two, when Toby was not on a leash, he got lost and went missing for three weeks, and we were pretty sure he had gone to the Big Crazy Lady's Lawn in the Sky and don't want it to happen again, and three, there's a by-law in our town that says you have to.


Toby puts up with being on a leash pretty well, actually. We thought he would rebel and we would have to break his spirit and forever suffer pangs of remorse for having quashed the independant spirit we loved so well, or some such thing. But really, we just put him out on a leash and he's been okay with it.


Although Toby is clever enough in some ways, his grasp of physics is tenuous at best. Actually, it's non-existant. And he seems to have absolutley no capacity whatsoever to catch on to even the most megre of concepts, namely: If you go around something, and you are tethered to something else, you are going to get stuck. This elementary idea eludes Toby utterly, and his little kitty brain seems entirely incapable of learning it, despite many, many harsh lessons. You would think that, after having gone around the basketball net 50 times and getting stuck, you would perhaps reconsider the 51st, but no. Here is Toby on his way....
And here is Toby in the position. Note the body language here, it says, "gaaaaahhh!"

Here is Toby wrapped around the plastic chair on the front porch. He is all relaxed and unconcered at the moment, but believe me, this is going to be quite a problem very soon. Eventually he is going to see a bird that needs killing, or another cat that requires a good smack-down, and both are very difficult to do when one is dragging a large, white plastic chair behind oneself. (Usually, every morning when I am having my coffee, I can hear that plastic chair scraping across the front porch, and if I look out the front door at the right moment, I can see it drift on past.)

Here is Toby waiting patiently to be discovered after having entangled himself in the patio furniture. This is a particularly heart-wrenching picture when it has been raining. Just to tell you, these pictures were all taken in one evening.

Lastly, this is what occasionally greets us when Toby goes all berserk and takes a run up the mountain ash tree in the front yard (Thing 1 calls it his "Jackie Chan mode")

He goes up the tree, can't get down, and then wriggles out of the leash entirely; a dangling leash and a cat on the loose. And I inevitably find him on the Crazy Lady's front lawn.