Kits and Cats and Vets and Having Both Arms Bitten Right Off at the Shoulder

This is Bandit, looking as annoyed as an Alpha Cat possibly can when trapped inside a soft cloth cat carrier, waiting at the veterinarian's for his regular checkup. (Bandit's checkup, of course, not the veterinarian's.) Bandit looks kind of cute in a poor widdle kittie-kins way, successfully stuffed inside that cozy widdle bag after ten minutes of fighting and a box of Band-Aids.

There will be blood...

This was not how Bandit looked moments after the picture was taken when he was removed from the carrier and the vet took a stool sample with a little plastic spoon-thinger that he inserted you know where. Bandit is neither a small cat nor a weak one, and he is certainly not a cheerful one under butt-probing conditions. As a grim-faced veterinary nurse and a badly frightened Bear (me) held cute widdle Bandit down for the vet to perform the obviously uncomfortable procedure, Bandit fought to get up like a maneating tiger unexpectedly coming out of anesthesia. He turned his head completely around like that kid on The Exorcist, looked at me with magma-red eyes, and bared gigantic sabretooth fangs with a blood-mad snarl you could hear through concrete walls 100 feet away. It certainly appeared to poor Bear that Bandit was ready to rip out Bear's throat in a tenth of a second and redecorate the examination room in a bright flashy shade of wet crimson. Of course, Bear would lose his fingers, hands, and arms first, as they would be in the way of Bear's neck. It is a miracle that I did not poop myself. Maybe I did, I don't remember. I also do not recall how we got that rabid hyena back into that amazingly durable cloth carrier, but we did. A beaming Scruffles accompanied me home, where I had nightmares for three days. "That was a great visit!" said Scruffles in the car. "He's healthy!"

This is a good place to credit Bandit's courageous veterinarians at our local Banfield Pet Hospital, usually found attached to PetSmart stores, where you can buy the latest fashions in catnip-filled rats and big buckets of cat litter that cannot possibly hold the poop that even one cat emits in a day, much less six cats. Thank you, Banfield, for keeping Bear's internal parts intact, though it would help if you offered psychiatric medication to freaked-out cat owners.