Woody Cavenaugh

I remember back in 1992 when I got my very first email account (still using it btw). I was using a program called "Mail" on VAX. Ok, all you guys who laughed at that are old geeks. All of you that failed to laugh at the VAX thing, but laughed at the "old geeks" comment-- You guys are N00bs. At any rate, not long after getting that email account I received an email about giving a cat a pill. It was uproariously funny and from the number of <'s in it I would say it had circled the globe many times before getting to me. This will not be nearly as funny as that, but it shares several things in common with that. It is about a cat, and it has to do with medicating one.

Sara's cat Maximillian recently had his teeth cleaned, he's 15 now and I guess it is about time for that. He is a good cat in good dental shape and got a gold star from the vet. He also got a bottle of liquid antibiotic he's supposed to have an ounce of it twice a day for two weeks. So upon getting home Sara grabs him up and fires a dose down his gullet with the included syringe.

Max who is perhaps the most patient and most forgiving cat to ever walk the earth did not like this one bit. He shook his head until stumbled. He tried to completely eject his tongue from his mouth. He foamed, he tried to run away from it. Licking his own butt didn't help. Even licking the dog's butt didn't help (didn't seem to do the dog any favors either). After several minutes of foaming, drooling, shaking, and being unhappy he finally vomitted, which seemed to solve the problem. For him anyway.

A call to the vet revealed that in this case we should mix it with his food and make him eat it that way. It was a sad couple of days, he'd eat a little, he'd foam a little, he'd make faces, he would eat a little more and the process repeated.

At the end of that couple of days, he drew a line in the sandbox. He was on a hunger strike. So what are a couple of pet owners to do? I wanted to find out what was so bad about that liquid, I mean, besides being pink. I popped the top and took a big old wiff of the offending pinkness. It smelled exactly like bubble gum. Bubble gum???

You see, mammals can share a lot of the same medicines just in appropriate dose sizes. Your cat gets car sick, just give it a child's dosage of over the counter children's montion sickenss medicine. Dog has pain, give him a buffered asprine. Cat has a little gum damage after a good vigerous cleaning, baby liquid antibiotic is just the thing. However, we now know thanks to experimentation and analysis that cats don't like bubblegum flavor. At least 100% of the cats we tried it on didn't like it. It may also be that the cat honestly is having an allergic reaction, but just in case, lets try another flavor. Personally, I'd like to run some lemon flavor past the cat to see if we'll have a sour puss in our midst. That would at least be funny. Plus the lemony scent would actually do our dog's butt some good as well.

I will have to remember to ask my pharmisist to request a new flavor to go with the other 50+ flavors that can go into children's liquids. I'm thinking liver. Of course, if I could get it in chicken or tuna I would like the taste as well. Come to think of it, I think I ought to request bacon wrapped fillet mignon flavor. You do that then we will have something so popular that you could actually turn an execution into something the victim would enjoy taking orally. No more rope, needles, gas, bullets or sharp bladed objects. Just a tablespoon and your guilty of nine counts of first degree murder guy will happily accept his demise. Unless he's a vegitarian, in which case, he needs to be stoned. (Both in the smoked up way as well as in the "to death" way should his munchies not make him crave glorious bacon wrapped fillet flavored death.)

But I degress, and suddenly crave steak.