Homeless behavior

Reina Isabel Dos having a drink from the bathroom tap.

Sometimes Reina Isabel Dos, the viejita with few teeth but an open soul, does things not befitting a cat, particularly one named in homage to that sweet lady and her ubiquitous pearls who lives in a castle next to a giant public park in London. Tonight I found a garbage bag ripped open, a chicken bone cleaned of its fat and ligament. What raccoon has done this? I thought. But then realized it had been my pet, the one with the large eyes and slightly dopey expression, who sleeps as though she is exhausted and has been for a long time. Isabel has not abandoned her botanical garden mentality. The dumpster-dive also explains the bits of glass and other debris I sometimes find between the bed sheets. The volunteers at the Buenos Aires park, which is home to dozens and dozens if not hundreds of thousands of cats, say Isabel (formerly Nacha) lived there for as long as they can remember. Isabel Dos's behavior reflects this. She blindly refuses to drink water from a dish or even a glass bowl for fear it might contain urine or dirt or who knows what from those awful opossum, always competing with the garden cats for donated Whiskas....She prefers to help herself from the bathroom tap. "Reina is an animal who knows what she wants," her fellow adopter said. It's not the tuna-flavored Whiskas. It's not healthy pet-store dry food bathed in hot instant chicken soup. Her calls for a package of Whiskas de sabor carne seem incessant; not hours pass before she's running at a clip to join me in the kitchen, hoping I'll scoop out some more of her favorite botanical garden pastime while I'm making tea. I see it as an addiction, and one of the volunteers of the association that feeds the botanical garden cats, who are essentially homeless and make a home among the tropical flora and stone statues and benches, agrees, saying the wet food is really like McDonald's -- a treat, but not to be had every day. The effects of the food will begin to show. Aside from added bulk under her furry old-lady gray pelt, Isabel Dos, queen of Great Britain, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the commonwealth realm, including her people in Las Malvinas/Falkland Islands, a Windsor who lives in Buckingham Palace near St. James Park (the cat version) is exhibiting the signs of mania, irrationality, mood swings and an insatiable taste for something that could kill her. I wonder when she'll become truly accustomed to sleeping on the end of a human bed, when she'll make distance between her wet black nose and the space heater, when she'll learn to like a Science Diet, when she'll stop acting homeless.