Bonker's Messes

I am often, if not always on the look for better ways to clean up after my cats. For instance, Bonkers sheds a lot. I've never known a cat to shed like this and I've had cats all my life. If I hold Bonkers for even a moment my cloths are covered with thick, grey cat hair. When we have people spend the night at our apartment we have to clean the futon so they can sleep there. Bonkers doesn't spend much time there anymore because I started spraying him with water everytime he'd get up there, but I would spend at least an hour with a combo tape roller thing and vacuum cleaning that thing off. I would usually go through an entire roll of that stuff.

I'm always trying to find ways to get him to not shed as much. A couple of years ago we bought this brush. It's rubber and is supposed to have some kind of static cling power to attract as much hair as possible and then you just pull the hair off. The brush worked really well. It would pull loose hair off that cat until the cows came home. If I'm sitting at my computer Bonkers will generally let me pet and hold him as long as I want, so I would sit here with Bonkers in my lap brushing him for extended periods of time. Before long I would have handfuls of thick, grey cat hair. Typically, there would be enough that, without squishing it down, would fill a coffee. And the hair kept coming. And coming. And coming. Finally I realized that the damn cat was growing hair faster than I could pull it off of him. It didn't stop. I would wonder why the cat wasn't bald, I could pull off so much hair. It was quite remarkable actually. "Bonkers! The cat with unlimited amounts of hair!"

After a while I stopped trying. He wasn't sitting on the futon anymore, and while the papazon chair the crevices within are a jungle of fur and hair with which one could probably weave a sweater for a small boy, we never sit there and just kind of let him take it over as his throne. I still brush him to remove the excess at times, but generally it's like one of those dreams where you're climbing a staircase that leads nowhere. What's the point. Just turn around and sit on one of the steps and wait til it's all over.

The only other problem we have with Bonkers are his rogue turd nuggets. Bonkers, if you didn't already know this, is without a tale, but he does have a little tuft of fur back on his butt. Sometimes when he goes #2 a perfectly round little poop ball will follow him out of the litter box only to drop on the floor somewhere along the way. So, when we arrive home from anywhere it's not uncommon for us to find a little present lying on the floor in any number of places. It's my theory, as Bonkers is keen toward batting around little things that roll on the ground, that he probably utilizes his feces as a little self made toy.

We've yet to come up with a solution to this little issue, short of shaving his butt. Now that I think of it, that's not a bad idea. I wonder if Amanda would be mad at me. Hmmm.