Scamper got a scare the other night when she was in here and another cat got in. Yes, the neighbor cat that thinks he’s everyone’s buddy had to come prancing in after she came in to eat. It didn’t help that I yelled at the neighbor cat (not that it made him leave–in fact, he decided it was an even better opportunity to run around.) Scamp freaked out and in the end, they both ran for their lives. I think I managed to scare the neighbor cat badly enough that he forgot to chase Scamp (He does this at every opportunity for no good reason. I don’t think he would hurt her, but you never know.)

At any rate, since that episode, little Scamper has been afraid to come inside. She came in once to eat, but now sits pathetically outside staring in the new cat door. Yes, we have a new cat door. Q, I mean BMHusband, decided that we needed a way to lock other cats out when she or Junior come IN. Step one was to build a more rigid (and see-through) cat door, rather than the heavy, colored flexible plastic one we had.

Once BMHusband had that cut out and attached, he also attached a one-way lock. Thus if Scamp ever decides to come in again, and if she doesn’t fritz when we move towards the door, we can actually keep other cats from following her in. She can still hop out at her leisure. The only problem thus far is that she refused to believe us when we told her the new door was better and that she would be perfectly safe inside. She comes by and will eat if we put food out (which we did as soon as we discovered she would not come back inside.) We have to monitor it closely though because we do not want other cats to find out when feeding time is. It must be mating season or prowl season because we’ve seen about 6 cats, three of which we’d never seen before. One is a very aggressive (male, we think). He chases Junior, sprays everything whether it moves or not–and gets chased out of the yard by us. I get tired of constantly hosing down wherever he has been, the bugger.

The neighbors on our other side also adopted a cat. It’s young, probably a fixed female. She hasn’t made any friends or enemies yet. Like all their other pets that are “inside only,” she escapes on a regular basis and visits. We have returned more dogs to that home (of various sizes, including a Great Dane, a boxer and a small fluffy dog about the size of a chihuahua) than we see on a week of walks.

It’s been a busy two weeks at the Schneider Pet Hotel.