Cat Tales – Article

Posted July 21st, 2008 02:53:39 am by Bill Frymire

(click image to enlarge)

In keeping with the pet theme, I thought you would like to meet the house cat who put an end to our pet goldfish. Her name is Mocha. She’s not really mocha coloured, but according to our kids, she gets her name from the “M” marking above her eyebrows. Actually, judging from the fatty paunch she is covering up, the golden arches of McDonalds seem more appropriate. After scratching at the screen window, her belly swings and bounces to and fro when she trots in and makes a bee-line for her catfood, only occasionally venturing off course to water and fertilize our houseplants.

As you may have guessed by now, I’m not a cat lover. In fact, I have a long history of adversarial cat relations. Many years before Mocha we had another cat named PIA (short for pain in the @&!). Pia also preferred our houseplants over her litter box and so I devised a cunning plan to “teach her a lesson”. I stealthily buried small pins that I pushed through pieces of cardboard just underneath the surface of the dirt, believing a few steps on these and she would stay away from the plants. Instead she merely dug out and flicked the pins onto the floor face-up where they awaited my return from work. In the end, I was the one who got the point of the lesson, and of course got no sympathy from my wife as I pulled the pins out of my heel.

I do tolerate Mocha and have even come to find her endearing. I can die happy now that I’ve experienced the unique sensation of fresh squishy cat fur balls between my naked toes. My wife claims they are coughed up fur balls but I’m pretty sure Mocha is bulimic. She does love to eat. The only exercise she gets is when she chases my printhead back & forth as it prints. As an added bonus, every few months I get to clean out wads of cartridge choking cat hair from my printer.

Still, for all the trouble and expense she causes, she is endearing to both the heart and pocketbook.
It turns out that this shot of Mocha is one of my better selling stock images, for kitty calendars and cat food advertisements. I guess the playfulness of her demeanor is what sells, although maybe she’s just bashful and self consciously covering up the fat sack that spoils her feline figure. So, even though she has turned all of our wooden furniture into her personal scratching posts, she has more than paid for them and the animal shelter fee for her “fixing”and shots. You could say she’s pulling her weight in more ways than one.

After a family dinner my brother-in-law started playing with the cat, perching her in various positions on our couch. Each time Mocha would squirm away, he would put her in a more comfortable balanced position. After a while, the cat entered some sort of trance-like state. She seemed to be genuinely relaxed (or frightened out of her wits and assumed a slave/master role). Regardless, my brother-in-law molded her into the pose he wanted with her tail between her legs and she stayed just long enough for me to get away this shot.

The shot itself is a more of a “being there” moment than a preplanned image. Right place, right time, cooperative model. No model release needed! The lighting was nothing fancy, shot at night with just one shoe-mounted flash bounced straight off the low ceiling with the bounce card up, which you can see in the catchlights of the eyes. I find the wide pupils from flash give the cat (and people) a friendlier expression. To see some other sides of Mocha check out these pics.

Mocha, she is a bad cat… but a good model, and for that I love her dearly.