Mouse Tales and Other Assorted Stories

Mouse Origins

This book is named after a cat named Mouse, who owned me and ran my veterinary business for 16 years. He arrived at the clinic in the early years of my practice, when he was about 9 months old. His owner brought him in for euthanasia, because he was “a dirty cat.” I tried unsuccessfully to explain to the man that neutering the cat would almost certainly stop the spraying of urine that he was understandably unwilling to tolerate. The man wanted no part of my explanation, insisting that I put the cat to sleep. I compromised by offering to take the cat at no charge to him, as opposed to charging him for killing and disposing of the cat, if he would sign ownership over to me. He gladly signed the cat over, and I found myself in possession of, or as it turned out possessed by, a gray male cat with a white bib and paws. Mouse, as his previous owner had named him, needed to have an abscess treated and be neutered and vaccinated. After that I would be ready to put him in a cage in the waiting room, so that some client would find him irresistible and take him home. As sometimes happens, a respiratory infection epidemic swept the clinic that summer, and Mouse came down with a nasty infection. Our treatments were much more limited in those days; it was several weeks before Mouse was well. By that time my employees had informed me that Mouse was here to stay as official clinic mascot. As I recall, they said something like “Mouse stays or we all quit.”

He took his role very seriously, sleeping in the waiting room, supervising the feeding and walking of patients, greeting owners in the parking lot, and generally getting into everything. In the 16 years that he lived at the clinic, I saw one client put him out of a chair, and two clients share a chair with him; otherwise the clients stood and the cat slept blissfully on the waiting room chairs. If you were sitting in the one that he currently felt was his personal chair, he would come over and stare at you. Frequently clients would stand up and give the cat the chair. If staff were walking dogs in the side field, Mouse would accompany them on their walk, especially if the dog liked to chase cats and would drag the staff person around the field barking furiously. Mouse always trusted that staff would manage to hold on to their end of the leash, and taunted the dogs by staying just out of reach. If people were putting food in dishes he had to check to see if it was a kind of food he’d like to eat, and wandered the kennel counters freely. He was not particularly interested in surgery, but loved office calls, and was known to come into exam rooms and wind around clients’ legs to be petted.

Mouse always seemed in control. If he was running it was for the joy of moving, not because he was frightened. If he was sleeping it was beneath his dignity to acknowledge the chaos around him. If he allowed you to pet him it was because it was his due, not because cats are supposed to like being petted. He ate staff lunches, batted pens off the receptionist’s desk, and a hundred other annoying things, and nobody ever took offense. The cover of this book is a black and white photograph of Mouse sitting on a porch railing looking smug, taken by a client. It was framed by another client, and the black ink footprints of a third client’s cat (which she had adopted from the clinic) grace the white matting. It hung in one of my exam rooms until I retired.

I have owned (or been owned by) a long list of cats, but none more memorable than Mouse.