She'll fish stray packing tape out of the garbage to chew on the coating material. She'll scratch at photographs to get at the tasty chemicals involved in the development process. It's very odd.
Callie doesn't have this addiction. She, instead, likes to lick plastic. Typically, this means sitting on the window sill and tasting the blinds over and over again until I have to shoo her off. If not blinds, then she'll find a plastic bin and lick the edges. It's very odd as well.
Callie and Mazzey both have a tendency to throw up on our floor. For Callie, this tipically means that she has licked some plastic that didn't agree with her stomach. It doesn't happen very often. But Mazzey is a perpetual hairballer. At her peak, she has been known to cough up one of those things every day for a week. Not amusing.
The fact that neither cat seems inclined to clean up after their messes only adds to the frustration. But we've learned to live with it.
What I'd rather not live with, however, is shredded furniture. This is a Mazzey issue more than an issue with Callie, who doesn't have her front claws. Mazzey is apt to claw anything in our living room, from couch (not a good choice) to chair (also not a good choice) to rug (ok, the rug is fine).
If she only clawed the rug, I wouldn't mind. But she can't control herself. And the cheap chair we bought a couple months ago is no match for her. It already looks like Swiss cheese on the arms.
So Liz invested this weekend in special anti-pet strips that you can put on furniture, and it's supposed to discourage pets from clawing them. Give it a try, eh? Why not? It's kind of like double-sided adhesive tape, and the instructions say that cats don't like the sticky feeling and evenually get their scratching fix elsewhere.
Great. So I applied it to our chair and sat back, waiting to see what Mazzey would do.
Soon enough, she walked up the chair ready to scratch. But she didn't scratch. She checked it out. She inspected it real good. And lo and behold, the tape worked! Our furniture wa
s saved! Mazzey would no longer be scratching our chair!No, she didn't scratch the chair. Instead, she proceeded to lick the tape and lick the tape and lick the tape, obviously much more fond of the chemicals in the tape than shredding the furniture. Something about those chemicals.
I guess we can't win.
