Retrospective: Pippin Goes Outside (on purpose)

Since I got Pippin from a Maine Coon breeder, he was born to a cat who had never had to fend for itself outside, and he was never outside to fend for himself either. Along with his cautious personality, this led to a cat who would sit in the kitchen while I brought load after load of grocery bags through a door open to the outside, and never once even try to investigate the doorway, much less run through it.

After Pizza and Tiger, who viewed Outside as the best toy ever and wanted to get there at every opportunity, Pippin's passivity in the face of access to the outdoors was quite startling, although very welcome. (It's hard to bring in the groceries when you have to do the cat dance in front of the door every time you want to go through it!)

When Pippin was about 8, we moved into our very own house. A year later, in 2008, I got a very strange urge to do things outdoors in my very own yard. Notice the house was "ours" but the yard was "mine." This was because Pippin showed no interest in it, aside from appreciating the cat tv provided by the chipmunks and birds on the porch. And I'm just as much of an indoor kitty as he was; being outdoors and doing things like planting flowers and making flower beds and all, that's just weird for me. I'm a book person, not a flower person.

But here I was, outside till it got dark every night, working mostly on a patio. My backyard is weird, and for this to make sense, I gotta describe it. It's surrounded by a fence. You go out the porch doors (which have windows down to the bottom) onto the porch. Then you go down a few steps to the deck. Then you go down some more steps to what used to be a circular above-ground pool, but was now just a flat area with sand.

The hardest part about making a patio with pavers is making the ground flat and sanding it. I already had that, so I was just placing the pavers.

Pippin was a little put out. Here I was, within sight, but out of reach. And he was bored after all day by himself. He wanted to be with me. And if I wouldn't come in and be with him, well, he'd just have to screw up his courage and come out and be with me.

So he asked. I considered the request. You see, he didn't jump if he couldn't see where he'd land. In fact, even then he'd usually just go around, and if he couldn't get there by going around, half the time he'd discard the idea. That meant a normal three foot chain link fence would contain him safely. And I could tell he didn't want to go outside. He wanted to be with me.

There came the big day when I opened the door and let it open. And watched, in mortal terror of my foolishness, for the great escape.

Pippin stood in the open door watching me work for a long time. (I didn't get much done, as I was watching him out of the corner of my eye.) Finally he ventured out onto the porch.

That's my brave boy!

The first day he didn't go off the porch, just sat on the edge and watched me.

The outdoors is a highly suspect place.

The first week, although he ventured off the porch, and even into the grass, he wouldn't sit down unless he was on a man-made substance. This led to a funny incident where he was far from "land" and got tired, so he sat down on the only thing he could find close by that was man-made--the downspout at the corner of the house.

To add insult to injury, the grass is also WET.

He inspected the patio quite often, approving of its slowly growing larger (more "land" for him to be on). I started from the middle, placing pavers until I got tired of doing it each night. They were heavy, and I could only carry one or possibly two at a time, so it exhausted wimpy me quite quickly. When I was tired of toting patio pavers, I played with planting flowers and stuff, and making flower beds.

The patio is almost finished, much to his approval.
I only had to put the triangle pieces in at this point.

This next series of pictures is Pippin on his third day out. He still wasn't sure about going off the porch, so he was investigating the flower pots on the porch. I'd previously observed his behavior with inside-plants, and I knew that although he sometimes opened his mouth and looked most alarmingly like he was going to bite into one, he was only using his Jacobson's organ to smell the flower/plant more intensely. (Cats, oddly like snakes, have a secondary ability to smell that's located in the roof of their mouths. If they open their mouths and breathe deep, pulling air across that, they get the secondary ability more intensely involved.) So I knew he wouldn't try to eat any of the plants.

I still watched him carefully, just to be sure no new plant sparked a sudden vegetarian desire.

Still not sure about leaving the house behind!

Sniffing the plants to see what I'd been doing
with the flower pots and plants he'd been
watching all this time.

All the way to the edge of the porch!
He's being so brave!

He even speculated about leaving the porch
for nature's ground.
He didn't, not this day, at least.

Much safer: no one can get him here.
But he's moved from the porch to the deck.

He's done exploring. Would I care to come in as well?

Now every time from the first time I let him out, I'd call him to come in when I was ready to go in, and give him a treat once we were inside the house. Even if he'd already gone back in, during the early days of his explorations.

At one point, when the outdoors had become commonplace, Pippin suddenly thought about this whole process. Wait a minute. I go out, I come in, I get a treat. Cool! He made sure I was watching him. I'd opened the door, but hadn't yet gone out myself. He stepped out onto the porch. He knew I had a tendency to be legalistic about things, so he made sure every bit of himself was Outside. Even the tail. Then he turned around and came right back in, and gave me the look that meant, "Treat"? 

I busted out laughing and said, "sorry, no, you have to come in when I call you in, not just any time you walk back in the house!" (Because by this time, that was the rule; he didn't need the reassurance for venturing outside anymore!) He looked most disappointed.

But the treat thing worked. He would come or not as he pleased when he was in the house and I called his name (which was fine by me; I didn't want him showing up every time he heard me say his name. Poor guy would be run off his feet, considering how much I talked about him.) When we were outside, though, I could call him and he'd come.

Even if he didn't want to. Pippin discovered that Outdoors had its own appeal besides me. He liked the little hoppy bugs in the grass. He liked to sit and sniff the breeze to see what was around. Most times when we'd come back in, he'd spend five to ten minutes vocally talking to me about everything he saw and did and heard and smelled Outdoors. I didn't understand exactly what he said, of course, but I understood he was talking about the experiences he'd just had.

The mighty explorer in his domain.

Once I remember especially, I called him to come in, and he really really didn't want to. It was getting on dusk, his favorite time when all the hoppy bugs came out. He was on the other side of the porch (there are only stairs to the porch on the one side, and he didn't like the deck stairs on the other side. Don't blame him--I don't like them either. They are rickety now and were rickety then.)

So he finally looked up from his hoppy bugs and trotted around the patio area, disappearing under the deck. "Pippin!" from me again. After a bit he appeared on the other side, hurrying now that he'd managed to tear himself away from his toys. He came right in, wanting his treat. Which he got, of course.

Once he scared the living daylights out of me. I left the stupid gate open. No, the gate isn't stupid. I am. I forgot he was out, because he was being his usual unobtrusive self, and I forgot. I left that gate open for ages. Probably fifteen minutes. I was taking debris from the trees out to the street. Back and forth, because there was too much for one load. And then I forgot to close the gate.

Suddenly I remembered. No, please no. I looked for Pippin, only to find him about five to ten feet on the wrong side of the open gate. Okay, good that I know where he is. Bad that he's out where there is no fence to corral him. 

And I can't let him know I'm panicked. It'll either panic him, or he'll find it amusing and want to continue the game. With him, it was more likely to be the first, but either way, I wouldn't be able to catch him. So, keeping my voice normal and cheerful like always, I announced that it was time to go in, and Pippin! Let's go in!

He looked up, grinned his cat grin which isn't a smile on the face like a human people but instead a whole body change, and came bouncing right over to me. Let's go!

I scooped him up, relief flooding my body, and hugged him rather more tightly than he appreciated (which he let me know with a mild squirm and a vocal comment rather like "meophf". I closed the gate, scolding myself internally to remember the next time to close the gate every time I went through it no matter how inconvenient it was, and took us both inside, where he got a treat. (Because he came when I called him.)

And then confused him by going back out again (as I wasn't done yet--the sun hadn't set). So that night he got two treats for coming in. Luckily he didn't figure out it was being beyond the gate that caused the multiple treat night. 

Although I didn't let him out while I was mowing (I'm not completely insane), he could observe this process from the patio door (the other side of it, obviously). He was very dismayed to find that the new room to the house I called Outdoors was subject to the same vacuuming monster that the Indoors part of the house was. Different sounding monster, but it worked much the same way, covering all the floor. I found him glaring at me indignantly when I came back in after the first time I mowed after he'd gotten brave in the Outdoors. It took me a while to figure out what he was ticked about.

Poor Pippin. I'm afraid I found it most amusing when I realized it was the lawn mower / vacuum cleaner comparison! 

I did have sympathy for the poor dear with one problem he had with the Outdoors. The first bird he encountered was a nasty mockingbird defending a nest (that he couldn't even get to; it was in the next door neighbor's yard!). If you don't know mockingbirds, be glad. They're worse than blue jays. It's intimidating have one dive bomb you even if you're a big human person. Imagine how much worse this menace from the sky is when you're a little cat! 

Pippin didn't know cats could make birds stop dead in their tracks (literally). All he knew was this scary monster was yelling and attacking him from the sky. (The bird knew cats. It stayed out of reach, so it wasn't physically harming Pippin.) He didn't like the mockingbird at all. Luckily it didn't put him off exploration entirely, since it made a lot of noise before attack, it could be avoided.

Unfortunately for my cat's reputation, he generalized the bird size and shape to all birds of similar size and shape. Which meant Pippin was afraid of even a mild robin (who wasn't paying attention to the cat who just emerged onto the deck). Pippin turned around and went right back inside. I felt so sorry for him, being scared of little birds, even as I found it hilarious (and thought I was quite the meany thinking it was funny!)

Pippin's flower bed

That picture is captioned Pippin's flower bed. This is because I made that flower bed from scratch. There was nothing but weeds there when I started. And I dug it up and put weed-stop fabric down and put holes in the fabric to have the plants come up through, and put an edging on it (the gray block in the left front corner of the picture). And I finished it on Pippin's birthday, so I called it Pippin's flower bed.

The patio is finished at last. Pippin approves.