Thursday, January 26, 2006

Bones


This is my cat, Baghira -- after the black panther in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books.

She's a marvelous cat, she loves attention, loves to play rough and she even does a trick: she rolls over on command.

The one problem we have at the moment is that she has started to go to the bathroom outside of the cat box. No urine, just solid offerings.

We figure there must be something wrong, like she is feeling unwell, or the other cat, Albion, is mistreating her in some way. There is definitely a different feline dynamic in the house, they are in each other's territory at odd times, and there are more open hostilities than ever before. I wish there were some good way to diagnose the issue, but I'm afraid there is not.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I think this is a pretty disturbing photo. Seriously. I'm not sure it is just the allergies. Those yellow eyes freak me out.

christian f said...

Very impressive. Black cats are always dificult to photograph. Did you play with the eye color, or is that for real?

Matt Dick said...

The eye color is for real. But the problem as you point out with black cats is how totally black they are, which is incredibly hard to find detail in in photographs.

So you have to use a flash, and she shees it coming and squints.

So in this case, she was very sleepy, and I used my tripod and my new wireless shutter release and kept the flash off. This is a three second exposure by the light of a two-bulb desk lamp.

Then I still had trouble bringing her out, so I desaturated the photo (meaning I made it black and white for everything but her eyes.

Doc Shazam said...

How many litter boxes do you have? I have 2 siblings, adn had only one box for along time. One cat began getting urinary infections, and the vet thought it was related to stress. He said even though they are siblings, they should have separate boxes. In fact, he suggested one more box than there are cats in the house.

Try adding another box or two and see if her "gifts" don't settle down.

BTW, got to you by way of SHadowfax, via my blog,
www.docshazam.com

Love the photos.