I’ve always found it intensely strange that a cat, when frightened in the proper way (slide your foot quickly toward a cat while it’s walking by to experiment with this) will leap straight up. I would think this would be a completely useless defense mechanism unless your enemy has a tendency to sublimate after it attacks. My wife suggested I make this into a strip, and the art I chose for this purpose suggested the punchline. It’s far wordier than I planned, but I really wanted to squeeze in the thing about the fuzzy deflating arches. Was it worth it? I dunno.
MRS. SHOEBOX’S ASSESSMENT OF TODAY’S STRIP: I really hope I never have to teach our son wear to wear a bow and leap straight up when confronted.
For further cat experimentation for the purpose of your own amusement, I recommend filling a Pez dispenser with Pounce.
Sorry the strip’s so late…entirely too many things have broken in the house since we got back from Balticon, and I’ve spent most of my evenings this week fixing what I can and wasting untold hours trying to fix what I can’t.
-=ShoEboX=-
Intriguing.. I assume it’s the fact that if you leap straight up, your enemy is likely to dive under you, then you’re on his back, ready to bite the fuck out of his spinal column.
What’s funny about most cat behaviors is they make the MOST sense to other cats. If you try that ”making yourself look bigger” malarkey on a cougar, he totally buys it!
It occurs to me that the “making yourself look bigger” thing is reported to have worked only by survivors. See the excellent PartiallyClips “praying lemurs” strip for a reference.
Once at my inlaws, my dog lay on the floor in the kitchen by a sliding glass door that opened to a deck under a tree that attracted cats who would stalk squirrels and birds. A cat came up the deck stairs in a stealthy manner totally eyeing a bird. The motion got my dog to turn her head and seeing a cat 6 inches away (through the glass), she let loose with a ferocious bark. The cat lept vertically at least two feet straight up, having no idea where the enemy had come from. It’s legs were going 100 miles an hour on the way down reminiscent of a cartoon animal. When it hit the deck, it shot off into the distance never to be seen again. 2 points for the dog.
I like the comic, love Chu Toi’s write-up.
Pounce in a Pez dispenser? Yeah, go ahead, train cats that they can get treats by slashing human throats and flipping our skulls back. How could that possibly go wrong?
The concept of it is that when the assailant is coming at you in a high rate of motion, to jump is to hurdle over them as the assailant flings through beneath. So, then you can escape with a head start and unscathed. Otherwise, if the assailant is close you rise in the air to to the assailant’s head and are able to attack in defense, blinding the assailant and then able to escape with minimal scrapes and/or bruises.
I was always taught that if an assailant is coming at you, you shoot him and then eat the banana, thus disarming him. If that doesn’t work, you can always release the tiger or pull the lever allowing the 16 ton weight to fall on him.
I hissed at a rabid raccoon and it ran away.
Eh. You scare a person bad enough and they jump two feet in the air too.
The comic is pretty funny, though it took a little while for the “we have no claws” bit to parse.
And then it sank in — people SURGICALLY DECLAW cats in your country … ? WTF?
Yes, yes they do. I do not, personally…I figure if you don’t have to replace your furniture every six months, you’re not a real cat owner.
-=’Box=-