Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Oh, Louie,” Yvette and Solange simper, making me the meat in a purring, shaved Persian sandwich.

“You have saved our careers,” the Sublime Solange says with a very effective ear lick.

“I am yours, body and soul,” the Divine Yvette says, flipping down to curl up with her furry front boots under her dainty shaded-silver chin.

Then her gorgeous green eyes widen and stare above and beyond me.

I turn as she takes off like the Silver Streak train.

Yup. There is a moth on the ceiling at twelve o’clock high, as the fighter pilots used to say.

Solange has gone mothing, too.

I turn and make my way to the apartment’s front door, hunkering down behind a gold-leafed wastepaper basket.

Either Miss Sue-Anna Weiner will walk in, or the maid will get up the courage to go out and I will be on my way … to the bigger and better things that await a dude of swashbuckle and savoir faire.

Savvy?

Tailpiece

Midnight Louie Deplores the State of Things

I must say that this case has given me pause.

Previously, I thought I had a pretty good grip on the ways of the world, especially my special turf in Las Vegas and the art of crime solving.

It is no secret I was born on the streets and came up the hard way. I am a self-made dude. I may even have looked down my black nose leather at those of my kind who settled for being people-dependent “pets.”

I know that I could lose access at any moment to Miss Temple’s bed and, more important, that lumpy bed of Free-to-Be-Feline nuggets topped with shrimp, salmon, scallops, what have you—and she has plenty of those—and still eat.

Only the koi pond at the Crystal Phoenix could keep a large and lusty fellow like myself going indefinitely. What is the old saying? “Give a cat a fish and he is a happy cat. Give a cat a chance to fish and he is an independent contractor.”

Midnight Louie’s Koi Emporium would hold up nicely next to Chef Song’s five-star restaurants at the Phoenix, and I would attract a better class of clientele.

But my entrepreneurial spirit is not the matter at hand. Or paw. Until this case, I had no idea that these willing domestic slaves could be so helpless and so abused if something happened to their loving masters.

Apparently, there are Cruella De Vils lusting to harm cat kind of all stripes as well as the spotted canine kind. (I still am not sure if Cruella De Vil is an actual person or a model of Cadillac.)

OK, pet is a politically incorrect word these days, and I quite concur. Call me a “pet” and I will staple your clothes to your epidermis for a couple feet.

“Animal companion” is more like it, putting us on equal footing with humans, even if “we,” the animal part of that expression, can come as close to vermin as a, ahem, black-masked ferret of my acquaintance.

Anyway, I have become convinced that our human companions, if we so choose them, are obligated to plan for the dread day when they are no longer available to serve us.

Look at the sad case of Miss Violet Weiner’s beloved cat clowder, at the mercy of whomsoever entered her home in her days of illness and weakness, none of whom could love her animal companions as much as she did, and some of whom harbored hatred of the helpless, whether human or animal.

Take nothing for granted, folks. We have cast our lots with you people since we became “domesticated” four thousand years ago. All we are asking is a little forethought of what dreadful fates might await us when the Grim Reaper starts tapping on your particular shoulder … say, when you are born! Do not get mad at me for saying so.

Remember, my kind’s first so-called “masters,” the ancient Egyptians, valued our vermin-catching ways and venerated us as gods. You can do no less, as you are four thousand years more evolved than those bewigged pyramid-builders. So they tell me.

Therefore. I will let my sometimes useful collaborator give you all the dull particulars. My role is to mount the soap box and pontificate. To agitate. To play the gadfly and annoy. To bask in the roar of the crowd and the approving purrs of Miss Great Bast Herself, cat goddess of ancient Egypt. I do not know why Bast is a she.

Her only flaw, but even gods are not perfect these days.

Very Best Fishes,

Midnight Louie, Esq.

If you’d like information about getting Midnight Louie’s free Scratching Post-Intelligencer newsletter and/or buying his custom T-shirt and other cool things, contact Carole Nelson Douglas at P.O. Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163-1555 or the Web site at www.­carolenelsondouglas.­com. E-mail: cdouglas@catwriter.com. Facebook: Carole Nelson Douglas.

Tailpiece

Miss Carole Nelson Douglas Sighs Heavily

Midnight Louie is such a seasoned diplomat … if you define diplomat as one who insults all sides equally.

He is right, though, that this note is going to be dull. Still, animal lovers need to think early and often about how to safeguard our surviving animals.

In most states, that will take a living trust, which sounds scarier than it is.

First, we as pet owners—and that’s how the law regards us and our charges—need to designate relatives or neighbors to step in and take custody of any animals in the event of our sudden deaths.

The pet owners’ dream is that some wonderful animal-loving soul would want to be an heir of their estate, move into their desirable house, and keep the environment stable until each of the surviving animals dies in turn. Say in, oh, fourteen years.

Good luck. Only the very wealthy have estates worth enough that it pays other people to forsake their homes and life situations to babysit the estate owners’ babies until they shuffle off this mortal coil. Many a comic mystery plot has been set around these circumstances.

The fact is, the situation is always more tragic than comic.

So, unless you want your animal companions to fall into the clutches of a Cruella De Vil, you will designate the veterinarian who will see the animals and be a temporary expert in their ultimate disposition and whose facility will be a temporary boarding place in case of your incapacitation or death.

Owners have choices, all hard. Realistically, relatives and friends cannot integrate all your pets into their homes and lives as one unit. If you’re lucky, you have enough of both so that all your animals will get a chance to join another household. But most people, even your best-intentioned nearest and dearest, are not experts at integrating multiple households.

You can assign a shelter to evaluate the animals and place them in loving foster homes and ultimately new homes.

You can decide to employ the “kindest cut of all”—a visit to the vet, like any other, after all—that will put them “to sleep, perchance to dream.”

Or, you can set up a living trust, designating a person who will inherit an appropriate amount of money to supervise all this, often a lawyer. And who trusts lawyers? Enter again the comic mystery plots, which are not really funny to the suddenly homeless but beloved animals involved.

One option is interesting. Leave your animals to a deserving established shelter, which will essentially pet-sit them in your house until their deaths, at which time the shelter will get the house as an asset to do good animal works. Well, you better have a really valuable house. Also, such shelters run on volunteer workers and they have turnover, and sometimes suddenly run out of funding, not a very stable situation for your pets.

Oh, Louie, you did leave me with the most ungrateful job…!

The bottom line is that we need to look into these options NOW. Meow. Me too.

I was first sent a book on this subject several years ago by Lisa Rogak, author of PerPETual Care: Who Will Look After Your Pets If You’re Not Around? It’s available online.