Cat versus Shark – It’s ON

For either Christmas or his birthday – I forget which – Riley was given one of those inflatable, floating remote control sharks that set the internet alight with amusing videos. It was the kind of novelty purchase that my husband can be relied upon making either very late in the night or after a few beverages (or both). Even so, that box sat in the cupboard unopened and basically forgotten until the first week of the school holidays. As I headed off to work one day, I left them with a project: go fill it up. That would keep them all amused for a while.

And it has.

Here’s footage of our Shark (imaginatively named “Sharkie”) floating about the place.

The clunking/grinding of its tail notwithstanding, it’s a quiet, some might say unnerving, presence around the house. Unlike the video, Adam has now mastered the art of having it float by a person while they aren’t expecting a four foot shark to be floating by, with the obvious, annoyed reactions. So it is perhaps understandable that the cat is well and truly sick of Sharkie.

Whiskers will sit and stare at that thing for ages and ages; plotting her coup in the regaining of the position of ‘top animal’ in the house, perhaps; waiting for the helium to has escaped enough that the shark sinks to a level where a stray claw will pierce the plastic and then the CATS ON TOP status quo will be reinstated.

Well – maybe. Not if what I recently saw is still true.

Whiskers was unbearable one day last week: foul tempered, twitchy and contemptible. More so than usual, anyway. I couldn’t figure out her problem until I took a look into the laundry, where her food and litter tray live. And there was Sharkie.

Obviously what had happened was Sharkie had floated in there somehow and the cat – in that very small space – was too petrified of it to go in there as well. So she’d spent the best part of a day hungry and needing to wee. I suppose I’d be cranky too. To test my theory, I pushed Sharkie out into the lounge room. No sooner had the very last tail fin passed the laundry door did Whiskers shoot inside the laundry, past my legs, to do her business.

‘fraidy cat.